The people's princess

Well, ok, not the People's Princess – I get enough of her from the Little Fat One, including a bizarre reenactment of a famous car crash in Paris during a family game, though that's a different story – but rather a princess for the people. Which is perhaps the kind of thing that only happens in fairy stories. And now I have the Monkees stuck in my head. Hmm. You may, quite rightly, wonder what the hell I'm rambling on about this time, but it all kind of makes sense, in my head at least. And in some ways this kind of vaguely anecdotal riffing is quite fitting for a fairy story that is both wonderful in and of itself, as well as holding up a mirror to the genre as a whole.

I refer, of course, to William Goldman's The Princess Bride. Which was right up my street really, and finally made sense of one of those quotes that infiltrate your consciousness somewhere along the lines, yet you have no idea from whence it came. If you know the book or, more likely, the film, you probably know which one. Anyway, it was a name I knew, but knew nothing about and as it turned out, I can only really say I wish I'd known about it sooner.

I've always been a sucker for the fantastic, for a happy ending, and for a well-told tale – this gave me all three. The "author's" narrative interwoven with the story itself added an extra layer to the story, giving it a different perspective and peering closely at the nature of fairies stories and of the nature of storytelling itself – how we deal with tragedy, what we tell people to protect them, and life's hardest lesson, that no, it is very much not fair. Throw in an entertaining cast, full of seemingly archetypal characters, but who all have rather more going for them, a classic adventure yarn, and a narrator of no small skill and you have all the ingredients for a fine novel. Even better, they were blended together successfully in order to create a book worthy of them.

Book number: 97
Title: The Princess Bride
Author: William Goldman
Category: Charlotte's choice