Stardust by Neil Gaiman
238 pages
Published 1998
Read from September 1 to September 8
Rating: 3 out of 5
One of my earliest fixations when I began this blog, all those years ago, was stories of Faerie or the Fey Realm intruding upon the modern world of cities. I read every such book I could find, for quite a while; an early staple of urban fantasy, this scenario generated many books for me to find. As with all fixations, of course, I began to tire of the same old storyline eventually. I'd start an urban faerie book, get bored as the author went through the usual motions, and drop out before the magic I still desired managed to charm me.
That almost happened with Stardust. It's a breeze of a book to read, written straightforwardly and printed with generously-sized font and margins; in the old days I would have finished it in a day, easily. It's charming and at no point can it be said to become a chore. But a couple chapters in, I reached a point when I went, "Well, that's nice enough," and couldn't motivate myself to make time for it. It just wasn't a pressing interest -- I'd read this exact story (more or less) a dozen times before. It certainly didn't help that the tale is of a nebbishy young man who barges into a magical situation he doesn't understand, runs into a spunky heroine who rolls her eyes at him and calls him an idiot and a dunderhead, and learns to navigate the supranatural realm sufficiently well to save her bacon and (spoilers) win her heart. With minor variations, that describes at least half of Gaiman's novels. I could even swear "idiot" and "dunderhead" turning into terms of endearment was repeated in another one of his books.
So that was all fine, and charming enough, and also completely unremarkable. This time I persevered, though (possibly out of a sense of completionism -- Stardust was the last major Gaiman novel I hadn't read), and I'm happy I did. The central romance plot began on some iffy ground; chaining up a woman (who is literally magical) to accomplish your own selfish desires, then treating it all as some wacky mix-up that can be forgiven after the man has a change of heart, leaves a lot of baggage (gender baggage, power dynamic baggage) to unpack. Nonetheless, the happy ending pleased me, and I especially appreciated how the major conflicts were resolved by the heroes exercising newfound emotional maturity rather than devolving into "action."
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