I started this book thinking it would be 5 stars. I love the movie, and I liked all the additional details/context this book gave me, and a lot of the writing is enjoyable and funny. However, parts of this book, especially the frame story, have just aged pretty badly. Parts feel racist, sexist, fatphobic, etc. all for throwaway jokes that are barely funny, if at all. Also in this 25th anniversary edition we get more frame story and a pseudo-sequel. These do more harm than good, and the author's character becomes 10x more annoying to read about - I would recommend sticking to the original story.

As the book goes on its sexist nature gets more and more obvious. I think because the movie streamlines everyone's characters Buttercup feels just as fleshed out as everyone else, but in the book it's obvious that none of the few women characters get the attention that the men do. For a book titled "The Princess Bride" it never feels like we're in Buttercup's head the way we are Inigo, Fezzik, Humperdinck's, etc. Buttercup frequently isn't really around, and when she is it feels like the author kind of forgets she's there and a person. Also

Westley slaps Buttercup???

and we just glide past it.

Given this book is subtitled "Tale of True Love and High Adventure" I also expected more romance/true love. All of the adventure in this book feels shown, while all the love feels told. Westley seems to mostly love Buttercup because she's beautiful - her beauty and that she loves him is all he thinks about when

he's distracting himself during torture in the Zoo of Death

. A lot of this didn't bother me at the beginning because I thought eventually the book would delve deeper into their relationship and we would see them interact more, but that didn't really happen. The ending of the book is all adventure that isn't as good as the Guilder sequences and cuts off abruptly. I'm left not really believing that Westley and Buttercup make it past the 3 month mark as a couple. 

This book has such huge potential and I'm glad I read it once, but now that it's done I'm honestly left hoping a woman will give it a rewrite at some point. I'm glad I have extra info to enrich the movie-watching experience.