A more perfect, luminous book you could not hope to find or enjoy. A modern fairy tale that sprinkles its casual modernity with wit and restraint, yet which is so deeply and madly in love with fairy tales that it never thinks to undermine or mock them, but celebrates them with a language that combines beautiful, straightforward simplicity with heartfelt, lyrical imagery.

I first read this is my first year of secondary school, when the film came out, which I never saw, and the trailer was on the television, featuring a brief glimpse of a knight fighting a fire-breathing dragon. Now, I was well familiar with the idea of knights fighting fire-breathing dragons, but the fact was you rarely encountered them in books and films and stories, and so I was quite keen to see this film which had a knight fighting a fire-breathing dragon as what was surely a major and crucial part of the plot. As it happened, I never saw the film, but someone gave me a book. I read it, and it was great, but my enjoyment was tempered by the absence of a knight fighting fire-breathing dragons, which loomed large in my consciousness, but not on the page. Until near the end, when Prince Lir casually mentions his efforts to woo the transformed unicorn by killing up to five dragons. Just mentions it, and that's it.

It'd be wrong to say I felt cheated, but my enjoyment of the book was thwarted by my own erroneous expectations, as happens from time to time. I am delighted now to correct that experience, and discover that this books is simply incredible. You can tell people like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, to name but two, almost certainly read and loved this book, and if you have any feeling for fantasy, or for fiction, or for good writing, you will too.