The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende
published 1983 - read 2005

Wow, I definitely didn't expect it to play out like this. I remember the movie (vaguely) as being a sort of standard fantasy adventure with the framing device of a kid in the real world reading what was happening through a book, and interacting a little bit at the end. That takes us up to about the one-third mark of the book, which gets a whole lot more interesting at that point.  The previously flat characterizations gain a very slight degree of depth (although they are occasionally re-flattened to maintain the storybook simplicity of things) and suddenly the story is about what this picked-upon, low-self-esteem kid from the real world does when he's thrust into a position of great power in the fantasy world. This leads to a set of uncomfortable chapters wherein the kid develops into a major jerk and you have to cringe at every single thing he does; his growth out of this phase is the real heart of the book.

Though heavy-handed, this "the rise and the fall and the self-improvement" narrative basically works, and is a nice approach to the "ordinary children interact with fantasy world" genre.  Some authors in this area (E. Nesbit, Edward Eager) really play up the characterization of the ordinary children, making them plausible and complex enough that they ground the fantastic point. With others (I'm thinking of C.S. Lewis), the characters are a bit blanker, but the fantasy world stories are steeped in very strong archetypical plots - journey, betrayal, redemption, or possibly a bunch of Biblical crap...so you project your identity into the vague kids and escape into the exciting stories.  The most dangerous route of all is to have the story be very original and not follow an obvious path, and to have the characters flatlined for a storybook feel. That's the route The Neverending Story takes 90% of the time. Which means that until maybe three-quarters of the way through, when you become genuinely involved in the kid's self-help saga, the book has to carry itself largely on how interesting the fantasy world and all its magicalness is. From time to time this runs into the same problems as the Polar Express movie, where there's nothing really to say but "Wow, it sure is fantastic there on that Polar Express!" Thankfully, Ende has a decent store of original and memorable places and scenes. I'm not sure anything will quite stick in my brain the way, say, Deathwater Island (from Voyage of the Dawn Treader) did, but there are some cool spots. If you're into the genre I recommend this one strongly.

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