Reader reviews

• bacteriaphage

  (4/5)

  unforgettable
• gypsysmom_1

  (5/5)

  This audiobook was read by the author plus at the end there was a Q and A session with Gaiman. It was a real treat to listen to.The town of Wall is in England but is right against the border with Faerie-land. Once every nine years the Faeries come to a meadow close to Wall and hold a fair.Tristran Thorne is half-Faery but he doesn't know that. During the fair eighteen years previous his father, Dunstan, had a tryst with a Faery ensorceled by a witch and Tristran was the result. After his birth he was delivered to the boundary between Faerie Land and Wall with a note giving his name and saying Dunstan should raise him. Dunstan was by this time married to Daisy so they took Tristran in and raised him as their own. At 18 Tristran fell in love with Victoria Forrester and one night when they were star-gazing they saw a star fall from the sky. Tristran promised to bring the star to Victoria in exchange for a kiss and perhaps her hand in marriage. So he travels in the Faerie land where he finds the fallen star who is a woman now with a broken leg (Yvaine). Tristran and Yvaine travel back to Wall encountering all manner of mystical creatures on their way. I don't think it is much of a spoiler to reveal that they fall in love but do they live happily ever after? That is the question.
• lakenvelder_1

  (4/5)

  I am not usually fairy tale reader but I'm a book club this was pick.At first I depiction reading the book but magically became entrenched in the story. This was a good story for a couple of hot afternoons.
• kristilabrie

  (5/5)

  A magical fairy tale, with love, adventure, conquest, and of course an evil witch. A classic, and a delightful, easy read.
• jjmcgaffey

  (4/5)

  A lovely fairy tale - the structure is perfect, but this is a modern story with actual characters. I like Tristan Thorn, he's fun. There's a lot of coincidences and people coming across each other later (and knowing it's a re-meeting, at that) - which fits with the fairy tale structure, of course. Nice happy-ever-after (approximately) for all (almost all) the right people, and evil getting the proper comeuppances. I'd like to see the illustrated version (though by Gaiman's afterword/acknowledgements, the illustrations were inspiration, not directly tied in to the story). And I may even watch the movie, which I don't do often.
• liscarey

  (5/5)

  This is a fairy tale, the like of which you have had read to you many times before, except that Gaiman pays more attention to character and motivation than Mother Goose or the Brothers Grimm customarily did. In the village of Wall, there is a wall, which is the boundary between the mundane world and Fairy, and every nine years, there's a fair in the meadow, just the other side of the wall, and people come from all over the world to visit and barter and have adventures. A young man of Wall, Dunstan Thorn, bargains with a visitor to give him a night's lodging, and part of the payment is that Dunstan, and his firstborn, and his firstborn's firstborn, will each achieve their heart's desire.
  
  The bulk of the story is about Dunstan's firstborn, Tristram, whose mother is a woman of Fairy. At eight years old, Tristram is greatly frustrated and annoyed because his parents send him away to visit relatives just in time to miss the first Fairy Market since his birth, nine months after the last Market. Eight years after that, Tristram wants to win the girl he's infatuated with, and she promises to kiss him, indeed to marry him, if he brings her that falling star that they have just seen falling through the night sky, to the east--the direction of the wall, and Fairy.
  
  And thus begin Tristram's adventures, with a rather different outcome than he plans on. Tristram and all the inhabitants of Wall are fundamentally decent human beings; the outcome depends on that fact. This is a marvelous book.