by William Goldman
4.8 · 4 reviewsSword fights, giants, true love, and a narrator who keeps interrupting — the funniest fairytale ever to mock fairytales.
In the kingdom of Florin, the most beautiful girl in the world loves a poor farm boy whose only answer to her every wish is "As you wish." When he sails off to seek his fortune and is reported lost to pirates, Buttercup resigns herself to a loveless betrothal to the scheming Prince Humperdinck. But fate, kidnappers, and a masked man in black have other plans, and what follows is a breathless chase across cliffs, swamps, dungeons, and dueling grounds.
Along the way you'll meet a Spanish swordsman hunting the six-fingered man who killed his father, a gentle giant with a poet's heart, a miracle-working has-been, and villains both buffoonish and genuinely menacing. It is a story of fencing, fighting, torture, poison, monsters, miracles, and above all, true love.
The conceit is what makes it sing: Goldman presents the whole thing as his ruthless "good parts" abridgment of a dusty classic by the fictional S. Morgenstern, complete with cranky asides about what he cut and why. The result is at once a rousing adventure, a sly send-up of swashbuckling romance, and a love letter to the stories we beg to have read aloud to us.
First published in 1973.
4 reviews
Read it to my kids a chapter a night and we were all heartbroken when it ended. Manages to be a cracking quest, a tender romance, and a comedy roast of fairytales all at once. Buy it, read it, lend it to someone you like.
I came in expecting a novelization of the film and got something even better. The narrator constantly butting in to explain what he 'cut' from the imaginary original had me laughing out loud on the train. It's an adventure that knows exactly how silly it is and loves you anyway.
Funny and warm and genuinely thrilling in stretches. The narrator's tangents are mostly delightful but occasionally I just wanted to get back to Inigo and Fezzik. Still, a comfort read I'll come back to.
Everyone talks about the giants and sword fights, but the real magic is the fake-abridgment gimmick. Goldman invents a whole publishing history and grumbles about it for pages. Somehow it makes the true-love stuff land harder rather than undercutting it.