Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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49 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A True Classic, 2 Feb 2001
By A Customer
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman is a true literary classic. Forget any preconceptions you may have of so called "funny books", this is a graphic NOVEL, and deserves any praise you can throw at it. Buy all eleven volumes of "The Sandman", you won't look back:1: Preludes & Nocturnes 2: The Doll's House 3: Dream Country 4: Season Of Mists 5: A Game Of You 6: Fables & Reflections 7: Brief Lives 8: World's End 9: The Kindly Ones 10: The Wake - You're reading this review 11: The Dream Hunter's - Slightly different but still fantastic. And of course there are two for his surprisingly spunky sister, Death: 1: The High Cost Of Living 2: The Time Of Your Life Neil Gaiman's Sandman is the pinnacle of graphic novel writing - something you can't do without even if you don't normally read comic books.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, perfect, bittersweet, 17 Mar 2006
I have read every book in The Sandman series, and this one was a real tearjerker. Every part of Gaiman's legendary series is incredible. I don't know of any other writer who can weave plots into such complex patterns whilst never losing each thread of story, each character, each unique creation. The characters are so vivid, so otherworldly, and yet so REAL. Everything about this series truly embodies how I feel after waking from a strange but not entirely unpleasant dream. Gaiman captures the confusion and beauty of my dreamworld seemingly effortlessly.By this book in the series there was a part of me that was deeply in love with Morpheus. There's so much depth to this character, and the series up to this point has been about his journey, his growth, his realisation of emotions that had previously been unknown to him. He has become almost too human, a contradiction to his true nature, and he needs to be reborn. The part of him that cannot change has no choice but to die, and he welcomes it with a weariness that is misleading, for if you read the series carefully you get the feeling he planned this all along. His "replacement" is perfect, and human enough to be a fresh, vibrant rebirth, one that promises to be less foolish, selfish, and cruel as the old. Honestly, I cried when I read this. There was one particular confession during the Wake from a character we'd only seen briefly before that left me shaken. It's the most perfect off-hand reference and it cuts you to the core. This is pure genius. If I ever meet Mr Gaiman I'll probably be reduced into a vacantly staring fool, so awed am I by his talent. I'm ashamed to say that the name of the artists who created this book escape me at the moment, but the artwork in this one was some of the best in the series.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The epilogue(?) of a great series, 19 Feb 2000
By A Customer
The king of Dreams is dead. Long live the king." A new Dream takes his place among the Endless. He is Morpheus, only not: "a different point of view", Abel says. Indeed, as you read through the pages of The Wake, you find out that the new Lord Shaper is a different representative of the same status quo. What comes at first as a surprise is a hint that the original Morpheus wanted to die! At that point, the story about Shakespeare's Tempest comes to make things clear: Prospero feels trapped within his own magic and thus decides to renounce it; Morpheus admits that he too is not merely attached to his responsibilities, but is the embodiment of his work. He cannot change, he may not change and yet deep inside his is saddened by the fact that he has no choice (let's not forget that among the Endless, Morpheus' sense of duty is second only to Destiny's). After a great and most glorious course through time, the journey has come to an end. Nevertheless, Gaiman finds refuge once more to the rules of ancient tragedy, allowing his main character to find redemption at last. Even though Gaiman has already refused to tell the tale of the new Dream's adventures, some things are left unsaid. The Dreaming is a wonderfull world to go back to and I bet there are many stories yet to be written and drawn.
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