Book 14: The Neverending Story

The Neverending Story by Ende begins as a lonely, imaginative boy named Bastian steals a book entitled "The Neverending Story" from a book seller and decides to hide out in the school attic instead of attending classes to read.  Within the book, the land Fantastica is in deep trouble.  Patches of nothing are appearing all over the places and swallowing up everything around them.  The Childlike Empress, who is the leader of Fantastica, is also very ill, and though physicians have come from all over Fantastica, none have been able to help her.  The empress sends a messenger to a young boy named Attian telling him that he must take her amulet and seek out a human boy to save them.  After several random adventures, Attian returns to the empress, who must then take her own journey to summon Bastian into Fantastica when he refuses to come himself.  Once Bastian gives the empress a new name, the patches of nothing disappear.  She gives him the amulet with the instructions to follow his wishes to find his way home.  The only problem is that each time he makes a wish, he loses part of his memory and forgets himself.  He wishes for all the usual things:  to be the strongest, to be the wisest, to be feared by others, etc. and attempts to set himself up as the new emperor of Fantastica.  Then, he chases Attian and the luckdragon, who raised an army to stop him, and finds himself at the city of previous emperors.  Here he finally learns the truth about the amulet.  If he doesn't find his way home before his final wish wipes out the last piece of memory, then he will be stuck in Fantastica wandering mindlessly about the city.  Eventually he runs out of wishes and is rescued by Attian, who helps him return home.

To be honest, I found the book a bit rambling and tedious.  The characters are highly imaginative and interesting.  The basic concept of saving Fantastica and then finding the way to return home seemed promising, but the randomness of the plot where the instructions are to follow your wishes made the book a bit frustrating to me.  It was impossible to tell if the characters were on the right track, if they were making any progress, and when they or even if they would achieve their objective.  There are also several points in the story where the author is talking about a certain person or place and then abruptly says something to the effect of 'but that is another story' and drops the topic without developing it.  Now granted, if he had developed all of those rabbit trails, it would have made the book much longer, and I probably would have given up on it; but it was just aggravating to have him abruptly turn the story back on point using the same mechanism over and over.   I'll probably still let my kids read the book and would say it is for probably ages 10 and up, but it is not a book that I'll read again.