However, as myself and others have done, it is very easy to feel the need to compare Gaiman's books to popular children's classics (I started the first paragraph by doing so) but Stardust is not a children's book.

Having the story so heavily reliant on a magical fairy market, surprisingly similar to the one in Neverwhere lost some points with me.Shakespeare's work seems ridiculously complicated to us now, but he wrote for the masses, just like you. Nevertheless, even though usually I dislike damselism intensely, the star is so well written and has so much by way of personality that I can’t stop but find myself on her side, though I freely admit I do have a fondness for sweet, tiny, gentle ladies, (not to mention stars) so I am rather biased here. In many ways it's a lovely, whimsical, humorous fairy tale, and I love fairy tale-inspired books, so I was predisposed to like this book, but in the end I had some issues with it. Tristran and Yvaine end up stranded on a cloud miles above Faerie when the candle burns out but are rescued by the crew of a flying ship. Tristran, as the last remaining son of Stormhold, had a choice to either embrace his birthright as the heir apparent or reject it to remain in Wall and live as he desired.

Every nine years, in the village of Wall in rural England, a market is held the other side of a stone wall dividing the realm of Faerie from our world. It was at one such gathering that young Dunstan, then but a lad of seventeen, first encountered the beautiful slave girl imprisoned by the villainous witch who had cursed her to a life of servitude. So surely our hero, who is by all accounts a nice young man, and who is after all so very in love with his girl back home who doesn't want anything to do with him (poor Tristran!I'll briefly sum up some of the story here to show why, so if you care about vague spoilers, ignore the rest of this review.

To win the heart of his beloved (Sienna Miller), a young man named Tristan (Charlie Cox) ventures into the realm of fairies to retrieve a fallen star. I don't plan to read the book but within a readathon I had to read it because it was the group read. Tristran similarly, though he starts as very much a love sick young man, grows up markedly throughout the course of the story, particularly because unlike most fairy tale heroes he’s neither got any unforeseen “get out of trouble free” type of powers, nor is he either overly confident or self-obsessed. He realized now that his childhood affection for Victoria paled in comparison to the true, profound love that had flourished between himself and Yvaine. Dunstan purchases a glass snowdrop from her with a kiss and, later that night, makes love to her in the woods.She confessed to Tristran that she never had faith that he would cross the wall and retrieve the fallen star, and that while she remained bound by her oath to marry, she rued having made it.

I felt the character development was lacking--as a cast of characters, he managed to assemble an interesting bunch, but no one was particularly special or deep. Challenged to retrieve a fallen star, Tristran Thorn leaves the sleepy English village of Wall and crosses into the land of Faerie and the realm of Stormhold. I can't say I'm surprised by the ending, I'm just glad it didn't end as expected - or maybe it ended as expected but not as it looked to end at first. She demurs, and he rashly promises to bring her the treasures of the earth--including the star that they just saw fall to the earth. Dunstan Thorn is a practical teenager living in the small English village of Wall, which sits alongside a long stone wall that separates the human world from Faerie.I've definitely been super critical of him for this, but these weren't incidental issues within the story: they were central to the plot. Also on route to claim the star for their own is a trio of princes, which ever one claims her earns the Kingship. Heartened by this wisdom, he gently told Victoria that while he had won her hand, she should only marry where her heart truly lay, and he renounced their betrothal. In fact, I've read a bunch of GR reviews where the reader hated it because they'd read the blurb comparing it to The Princess Bride and The Neverending Story and seemed struck down in horror by the sex and violence. Una: A cat-eared faerie girl of great beauty who works as a slave for Madame Semele until released by an improbable occurrence that fulfills the conditions of her debt.