2nd November 2024

Having watched the film often as a child, I was attracted to find out what the book was like, so picked it up recently. Turns out it’s both similar and not.

The film is covered in the first half of the book, and then the book goes off onto a continuation of the story. Where the film cut off does make perfect sense to stop though.

It’s an incredibly episodic tale. There are 26 chapters, each starting with the next letter of the alphabet, which is a clever trick especially given it’s translated from German, and only once felt like the translator had struggled to get the letter to work in English.

But what I found was that it really did feel never-ending. It was hard to get through multiple chapters in a sitting, and so felt like a real slog to get to the end.

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