A Little Stardust Never Hurt Anybody

I read a lot of books and it is not often that I find a new favorite.  As a matter of fact, I think it's been ten years.

My "old" favorite was a classic:  Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.  Oh yes . . . I was in high school when I discovered this angst-ridden novel and the doomed love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine on the misty moors. Don't get me wrong, WH will always hold a special place in my heart, but it must make room for my new favorite book:

Gaiman blew me away with Stardust's absolute originality.  The way it melded the fantasy world with the "real" world was amazing.  The love story is believable and (gasp!) there's a happy ending (and I've never been a girl who fawns over a happy ending in a novel--I kinda like my angst, thank you.).  You'll totally find me rolling my eyes at stories like "The Princess Bride" and "The Notebook".  I just find them, I don't know, fluffy?

Stardust differs because it has this crazy darkness as well as mystical lightness (akin to "The Never Ending Story") making it anything but a childrens fairytale--about a boy in love and his journey to find the fallen star whom appears in the form of a girl, complete with a witch and her sisters who want to cut out the young star's heart to steal her youth, and the there is a graphic slaughter of a unicorn (yes, a unicorn!).  Very sad.  Anyway, it is essentially a love story between two people who don't realize their love for one another . . .

Oh, I just love that.  :-)

I would highly recommend this novel (and even the movie, for that matter--though it does stray a bit from the book).  I shall share a few of my favorite quotes:

"He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity.  He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does."

 "They kissed for the first time then in the cold spring rain, though neither one of them now knew it was raining.  Tristran's heart pounded in his chest as if it were not big enough to contain all the joy that it held.  He opened his eyes as he kissed the star.  Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her."

" . . . He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize how much he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called."

"'Could it be that the heart you seek is no longer my own? . . . I have given my heart to another.' 

'The boy? . . . You should take it back then, for my sisters and me.  We could be young again, well into the next age of the world.  Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it.  They all do.'   

'Nonetheless,' said the star, 'he has my heart.'"

So there you have it, my tea drinking, blog reading friends, my new favorite book . . . of the decade?  We'll see I suppose . .  Enjoy!

Sincerely,
Nik

FYI:  The Stardust Soundtrack song in my player at right is actually "Rule the World" by Take That.  It's pretty corny, but I thought it was fitting.   :-)