Stardust (1998)

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.
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An favorite fantasy story taking a young man out of his familiar "real" world and sending him on an adventure through faery. I loved the Star (yes, pun intended) of this tale. :)
This book is frequently visited and revisited. It has a permanent place on my special shelf for a few stories that I will pick up, open at random, and read a bit just to depressurize for awhile. It's an antidote for too much reality in anyone's world.
The characters are fully formed, the voices and speech are easily heard in my head. I build the world in my mind and it feels so familiar. ( )

My first Neil Gaiman book and I am hooked! Fairy tales and magic must come from my Scottish heritage because this book rings so true. Are all his books this wonderful? ( )

The first couple of chapters were a little slow and not in my zone but as I continued to read, I really got to like this book. It's described as an adult fairy tale and it is. But it also has strings that make you think about things,such as what you want and what you think you want. The book feels somewhat ethereal, which is both a good thing and not so good but it kept me reading in a genre that I didn't think I particularly liked. I may even read something else of Gaiman's. I like the TV show American Gods and the theater play Neverwhere, so maybe I'm a fan. ( )

A sophisticated yet simply told fairy tale, assured and as beautiful as a madrigal. An impetuous, naive lad who does not know that he is half-fairy, half human, sets out on a quest to bring back a fallen star, who turns out to be a wounded young maid. Adventures ensue. ( )