The Neverending Story
Bastian reads a book about Atreyu saving Fantastica from the Nothing, then discovers he is part of the story. Ende's meta-fictional fantasy about the relationship between reader and narrative remains one of the great philosophical novels for all ages.
There is a hard seam near the middle where the 1984 film’s version of the story ends, and a large minority experience what follows as a weaker second book stapled to the first, “the two parts of the novel repeat each other” as one critic puts it. Momentum drains into episodic wish-fulfilment with no clear throughline, “a slow, overdone, meander.” The protagonist becomes markedly less sympathetic partway through, one reader “becoming disenchanted with Fantastica, losing nearly all of my initial excitement.” Manheim’s English translation is knocked for stiff, over-formal diction. And the refrain that charms the fans reads to others as a tic repeated to parody.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
