Stardust

I remember watching the movie first, being really obsessed with it, and then being somewhat disappointed by my first reads of this book. This was also many, many years ago. I decided to pick it up again this time knowing that I now have some distance from the movie and also that my reading preferences and tastes have changed in the intervening years, so I was curious to see if my opinions may change. Boy, it sure did. I think I might've rated this around 3 or 3.5 stars before but I'm bumping this up to 4 and even 4.5 stars.

In the village of Wall somewhere in Victorian England, Tristran Thorn sets out to find a fallen star to impress his lady love, Victoria Forrester. He goes through the Wall from which the village derives its name, into Faerie. He doesn't understand why Faerie seems so familiar to him, or how he's managing to find his way to the fallen star without any guidance, but he does. He just didn't expect the star to be a very, very sassy lady made even more irritable by a broken leg from falling from the sky. He attempts to convince her to come back to Wall with him to be presented to Victoria. Along the way, they meet several witches, unicorns, devious brother-princes, and lightning-harvesting pirate ships in the sky.

The events of the book and the movie were generally almost the same, so I really need to give Gaiman some props for having come up with such a rich, beautiful, fairytale-esque story that translated so well into the movie that I still love. What is the point of contention here, and what really drove me to have such different impressions of the book during my first and current read, is everything else - the storytelling, the setting, the whole vibe of the story. While the movie is light-hearted, campy and family-friendly fun, the book has a distinctively more adult-fairytale feel, which I was disappointed with before but now am delighted by.

This book also explores the idea of consent and boundaries that was way ahead of its time, and which also sadly did not translate into the movie.

“I was a wood-nymph. But I got pursued by a prince, not a nice prince, the other kind, and, well, you'd think a prince, even the wrong kind, would understand about boundaries, wouldn't you?”“You would?”“Exactly what I think.”

I also kinda weirdly love that parting scene between Yvaine and the old lady that used to be the witch-queen. Even though she's done so much harm and killed the poor unicorn, somehow Yvaine found it in her to be just the right amount of forgiving - not to the point of trying to save her from her sisters' wrath, but also just letting go of the past and leaving her be since she's lost the capacity to harm her. I did kinda wish that Lady Una would've been the next Ruler of Stormhold, that would've perfected the book for me.