This book was hard for me to get into, but between when I checked it out in February on a Kindle and today, the library purchased an audiobook (I think I requested it). It was so much easier for me to get through in an audiobook. The concept was initially confusing, but I eventually understood it.
"Write your own story"....That is the personal message I derived from it, as I am embarking on a "write your own story" kind of change starting in June.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
We first meet Sylvie, the princess heroine of the book-within-this-book, as she is rushing back to page three, summoned by the attention of the first reader to crack the covers of her fairy tale in a very long time. Didn’t you know that the life of storybook characters goes on even once their books are closed? Well, as we learn in this ingenious novel, such characters are just as surprised to find out that readers have a life apart from their reading. “You mean you don’t know how your own story turns out?” Sylvie asks Claire, the young girl who becomes entranced by Sylvie’s tale, then rescues the princess and her fellow characters when the volume they have inhabited for eight decades—since Claire’s grandmother possessed it as a child—is threatened by fire. As the resourceful Sylvie escapes the borders of her book to enter Claire’s dreams and take up sometimes perilous residence in the girl’s imagination, real young readers—and their parents, if they’re lucky—are bound to become lost in one of the most inventive and exhilarating narratives they’ll ever discover. Filled with surprise and magnanimous wisdom, The Great Good Thing is a marvelous invocation of the power of books to transcend time and pass enchantments across generations.
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