I finished reading this to my 7-year old daughter tonight. We both loved it immensely. It was a little touch and go at first as it appeared she was not really into it, Fred Savage style. But the story sucked her in (because it's amazing) and she couldn't get enough of it. I even overheard her recently explaining to her younger brother about how Prince Humperdinck is trying to start a war with Guilder. We're going to watch the movie tomorrow. She can hardly wait.
Speaking of which, I was surprised at how similar the book is to the movie since the movies usually change a bunch of stuff. But the book is pretty much the same thing as the movie, which made me love the book since the movie is perfect as we all know. I guess it helps that the author of the book also wrote the screenplay for the movie. Seems like that should happen more often. The biggest difference, that I could tell, was that Inigo and Fezzik had to fight their way through the "Zoo of Death" to get to where Westley was being tortured by Count Rugen and Prince Humperdinck.
I liked how Goldman pretends that he is abridging a much longer book originally written by an author named S. Morgenstern. It was a nice touch. His intro explaining why he is making an abridgment is pretty genius.
There's also this awesome part where Goldman does an aside (as he does a handful of times throughout the book) during the reunion scene between Westley and Buttercup right after Buttercup shoves Westley down the ravine, realizes it's her Westley, and jumps down into the ravine after him. During his aside, he mentions that S. Morgenstern just moves forward with the story without writing more about the reunion between Westley and Buttercup at the bottom of the ravine. He felt that there should be more and said that he wrote a reunion scene but his publisher would not let him add it to the book because he is abridging S. Morgenstern's book and an abridger is not supposed to add material. So Goldman says that if you want to read the reunion scene then just send a letter to the publisher. He provides an exact address and everything. My daughter really wanted to send in a letter. But since the book was written decades (plural) ago, I figured I'd check the ol' trusty internet to see what the deal is with requesting this reunion scene. You can read here for details on what happened when people sent in such a request: http://nowiknow.com/the-deleted-scene-from-the-princess-bride/
Anyway, this book was great and my girl and I are very excited to watch the movie tomorrow.
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