Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Stardust is a modern day fairy tale of witches, magic and princes all wrapped around a true love story.

 

The book begins in a relatively normal setting of an English town called Wall, a place which every few years host a market where strange and mysterious folkare allowed to pitch stalls and sell a range of weird and wonderful items.

Many of the strangers to the town are from Faerie, a magical but dangerous place, which is on the other side of the wall to Wall!

Gaiman users a wonderful prose to describe the two different worlds and the unique characters which inhabit them. Those two worlds collide creating the main character Tristan Thorn, who sets out on an advantage from Wall though Faerie after declaring to bring back a fallen star for the woman he loves.

Stardust follows Thorn’s quest where he is assisted by a unicorn, a dwarf, a talking tree and a captain of a sky-ship floating through the clouds.

His desire to find the star coincides with that of an evil witch who wants it to rejuvenate her youth and a trio of brothers who require an emerald from the star in order to become the next Lord of Stormhold.

When reading Stardust, not only does it take a few chapters to get into the story, but it often feels as though this is a second novel to a long running story as the characters are quickly introduced and then out again.

Gaiman admits this is a sequel to a book he hasn’t written yet and there are many opportunities to develop the stories further from the characters he has created.

A book could be written entirely on Stormhold and the princes which battle against each other to become the Lord of the Land.

There is every type of fairy tale character crammed into Stardust that you can’t help but want to read more and more. From what is a relatively slow start, Gaiman’s Stardust gathers pace into an exciting tale about a boy falling in love with a girl in a strange world, which is full of adventure and mystery and is crying out to be discovered.

Stardust is certainly worth discovering.

The Review of Books score: 4/5