This is one of those classic children's books that sprinkle golden fairy dust on their reader, and charm everyone with their magical story of faraway kingdoms full of strange creatures and mysterious places. Or, at least I presume this was supposed to do that. Unfortunately, I wasn't particularly charmed or impressed. The Neverending Story isn't bad, it just left me pretty much indifferent. I'm not a fan of fantasy (at least the typical high fantasy that usually springs to mind when the genre is mentioned), but in children's books it usually works. I've seen the movie adaptation, but I basically only remember the horse scene and the cute dragon, so I don't have any nostalgia problems preventing me from liking the book on its own.

Here we have the usual quest that requires some apparently very special individual, or otherwise Fantastica is destroyed. There's an interesting story-within-a-story structure and inventive world building, but unlike in Narnia for instance, I never got invested in the heros' journey, nor was I excited to see how everything would be solved.

Obviously, as we all probably guessed, the hero from our world grows in the process and the story is wrapped neatly, but everything happening before that is the issue. The first part is ok and understandably the one that got made into a movie, but the second part was an even bigger chore. It's just an aimless and meanderingly slow build-up to the hero's life change. The styles of the two parts keep them too separate. There is a point to why we first have to read about the first journey, that much I understood, but it doesn't work that well.

All in all, as much as I appreciate the effort to deal with the fine line between fantasy and reality, the reminder how the real world needs a hint of magic (but also how losing yourself entirely in the world of fantasy is also detrimental), the praise of the power of imagination and storytelling, and the concept of Nothing, I started to miss my old favorites again.

Human passions have mysterious ways, in children as well as grown-ups. Those affected by them can’t explain them, and those who haven’t known them have no understanding of them at all. Some people risk their lives to conquer a mountain peak. No one, not even they themselves, can really explain why. Others ruin themselves trying to win the heart of a certain person who wants nothing to do with them. Still others are destroyed by their devotion to the pleasures of the table. Some are so bent on winning a game of chance that they lose everything they own, and some sacrifice every thing for a dream that can never come true. Some think their only hope of happiness lies in being somewhere else, and spend their whole lives traveling from place to place. And some find no rest until they have become powerful. In short, there are as many different passions as there are people. Bastian Balthazar Bux’s passion was books