The great thing about it, IMO, is that the novel's not about the story from the movie, really, but nevertheless you can do to it what the protagonist is doing to the fictional Princess Bride book and tell it to your kids as if it were the movie, by skipping the "boring parts", i.e. the important parts if you're reading it as an adult. It's a great and funny adventure story for kids, wrapped in a melancholy meditation on relationships with children and recapturing lost time and experiences for adults[1], which is (rightly) absent from the movie. The story itself tells you how to adapt it for reading to kids. It's its own instruction manual.
I absolutely love the notion of a kid picking up the book as an adult, expecting the story their parents read to them, and being surprised by the discovery of the real story, hidden from them in exactly the same way the bits about economics and such were from the protagonist. It's simply brilliant, and a scenario I fully intend to set up for my kids :-)
[1] This is from memory—I read it several years ago, and if I revisit it I'm sure my take would have more nuance now, and would find this to be an embarrassing misreading or oversimplification.
The great thing about it, IMO, is that the novel's not about the story from the movie, really, but nevertheless you can do to it what the protagonist is doing to the fictional Princess Bride book and tell it to your kids as if it were the movie, by skipping the "boring parts", i.e. the important parts if you're reading it as an adult. It's a great and funny adventure story for kids, wrapped in a melancholy meditation on relationships with children and recapturing lost time and experiences for adults[1], which is (rightly) absent from the movie. The story itself tells you how to adapt it for reading to kids. It's its own instruction manual.
I absolutely love the notion of a kid picking up the book as an adult, expecting the story their parents read to them, and being surprised by the discovery of the real story, hidden from them in exactly the same way the bits about economics and such were from the protagonist. It's simply brilliant, and a scenario I fully intend to set up for my kids :-)
[1] This is from memory—I read it several years ago, and if I revisit it I'm sure my take would have more nuance now, and would find this to be an embarrassing misreading or oversimplification.