The Princess Bride by William Goldman

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is one of those book I heard about all the time from the very young age, and somehow it kept escaping me until now. Frankly speaking, I now I wish I kept it like that and never picked it up.
This book is like a ball of sharp rusty spikes hidden in a colorful cloud of cotton candy.
It lures you in with rumors and positive mentions by other people in their fiction and fanfiction (though, tbh, I think most of the time they are talking about the movie), it fools you with brilliant glitter of its writing, and genius of dialogs and descriptions. There are a lot of great things about its writing. But then you reach the story.
The story, that features an imbecile heroine, multiple psychopaths with a Zoo of Death (yes, a place where they torture and murder all kinds of beings for fun), hero being tortured physically and mentally to death for loving an imbecile, a cocktail of many of the worst things about humanity, and all ‘friendly’ characters dying at least once… like death is a fun joke. Basically, all the things you really don’t need in your life. The ‘gore and death for everyone, for fun!’ style I simply can’t stand.
After I finished this book, I sat there and imagined what it would be like if you’d take just the story and write it down in the ‘okay’ modern standard style of writing, and I realized I would give it 1 star and throw it into the trash, which I don’t do to books, period. But that’s just how this story made me feel.
If you strip it out of its shiny writing, it’s a terrible, terrible book.



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