This book is barely more than 200 pages, I thought it would be a breeze. But it was a slog to get through! I have some spleen I need to vent. Spoilers ahead.

My first gripe, is that this book suffers terribly from a toxic male gaze. The first chapter is about a man who cheats on his intended fiancee with a Faerie girl, and gets the Faerie pregnant. The remainder of the book follows their offspring - now a teenager - a boy named Tristran who won't take "No" for an answer. He has a crush on a girl (Victoria) who flat out tells him she's not interested, and never will be, but nevertheless he kidnaps /another/ girl (Yvaine) to somehow prove to Victoria that she owes him a kiss.

This book would have been incredible if all the men were edited out of it (sorry men! :'(). Without selfish Tristran and his selfish dad, or Tristran's selfish uncles who get killed off with no real impact conflict-wise on the story, we have remaining: The Witch Queen, Yvaine the fallen star,
Lady Una the missing princess of Stormhold, and Meggot, a healer aboard a skyship. In a nutshell: Lady Una is missing because she was captured by a witch, and is now cursed to be her servant - and sometimes a bird - until "the moon loses her daughter". The spiteful King of Stormhold knows that the right of succession passes to whomever of royal blood possesses the crown jewel, a topaz. So, he throws the topaz into the sky, where it knocks Yvaine (the moon's daughter) to earth. Yvaine wants to go home, but believes it's impossible; maybe with the help of a magic "bird" and a skyship, she could fly home! Meanwhile, The Witch Queen desires the fallen star; if she eats the heart of a star she'll stay young and powerful. Consolidate the witches into one witch and boom, done, nice tight story, two protagonists and an antagonist, fated (dare I say, star-crossed?) to cross paths in Faerie. You could even keep the romance subplot, if you wanted (lords know the book's strained definition of "romance" wherein Yvaine cusses about how much she hates Tristran, Tristran pines for another girl, and then in the end they kiss in the rain for no earned reason, needed reworking anyway); just have Yvaine and Una fall for each other. Or leave them platonic, either way, a story of female empowerment and the trials and stages and comraderie of womanhood, instead of the fairytale of a bunch of greedy little men who never learn their lessons!

Did I mention I had some feelings about this book?

My next gripe is the whole premise of "a fairytale for grownups". This book was like an octopus, trying to have one foot over here, another reaching over there, another stuck firmly over here... Most of the time, it wanted to be a random, whimsical story, in the footsteps of Frank L. Baum's Wizard of Oz series. But being /totally/ random is confusing, and - in the end - pointless. As a kid, it's fun to get lost in an adventure; that's how kids' pretend play usually goes! But as an adult, I've found, I don't just turn to fairytales for /pure/ escapism. I also turn to them for some kernel of truth: love triumphs over any adversity; or, life is hard and sometimes we suffer unfair losses and sacrifices, but we grow wiser and fuller for it; or, Good conquers Evil when Friendship and Reason prevail! An example of a book which is random, but offers wit and insight, would be "The Phantom Tollbooth". I expected more depth from "Stardust", since I know of what the genre is capable.

At other times, the book wanted to be a dark fantasy, with gratuitous descriptions of violence and sex. But these times were so few and far between, that they were jarring, and put me off reading. I love a dark fantasy ("Nevernight", for example), but jumping tones between Childishly Random and Gore Porn is no more appropriate or welcome than finding out your babysitter is a pedophile (I'm looking at you, Zombie Unicorn!).
There was a simple solution to the book's tonal whiplash: write more. See, the book yada yada's over sky-pirates (or sky-merchants?), goblin wars, battles (and later peace treaties) with giant eagles, a hot air balloon ride into Hell, the Unseelie Court, an entire coven of witches, talking trees who worship Pan, a mysterious magic man in a tophat, and a mysterious hairy merchant (who may or may not be a werewolf?) with a case full of magical items. Those are A LOT of loose ends. If this book were actually /about/ how Tristran and Yvaine faced off against a bunch of violent, magical enemies, and eventually brokered peace across the land of Faerie, then this book could be confidently both Random and Adult. But the book only /eludes/ to these encounters, never delving deeply, nor showing us the protagonists handling a conflict for themselves very often.
In a new edition prologue, Gaiman admits that he had planned Stardust to be the second of more books in a series. He wanted the first book to be entirely about Wall, and how it flirts with its neighbor, Faerie. And he wanted Tristran and Yvaine's many adventures to be the subject of /future/ books. All good ideas, but an idea and a published product are not the same thing. /This/ book needed more action, more conflict, more agency from its protagonists, more interaction with the world around them, more reasons to rely on each other (and therefore fall in love with each other). More. This book needed /more/.

If anyone is intrigued by the /ideas/ in this book, and wants to read a series which does /more/ with it, I highly recommend The Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell.