Phantastes Review

Phantastes by George MacDonald! I’ll be honest, I didn’t love this book… but I also didn’t hate it!

Phantastes had a really nice beginning, which was my overall favorite part of the book. It starts off with Anodos (yeah, I didn’t know his name either til I looked it up 😂) traveling through Fairy Land Forest. I loved how George MacDonald described the forest, giving me a similar vibe to what the Hobbit gave me years ago. As Anodos travels through the forest, he gets pursued by the evil Ash tree and we find out that the trees are alive, or at least some of them, some good and some bad. That’s when my favorite scene from Phantastes happens; he falls asleep under the Willow tree.

After Anodos starts to come out of the forest, that was when I began to get rather bored with the book 😔. I understand that there is probably some symbolism in the book, but the villain didn’t stay consistent… it seemed to me that the Ash tree just disappeared after the last encounter, replaced by an odd shadow. MacDonald goes on to a palace and goes into great depth to describe many of the books that Anodos read while he was there, myself often getting confused with what was happening, only to realize at the end of the chapter that it was just another book. To me, Phantastes felt more like a collection of short fairytales from the perspective of one character

One last thought before I end. MacDonald, consistently throughout the book won’t explain something and instead would give a fleeting feeling or thought in its place, and I rather enjoyed the creativity of it.

Throughout the book I thought that I would have much more enjoyed the book as a younger child, around the same time I read the Hobbit, so if you are a parent of younger kids, I would definitely recommend you read this to them. I would give Phantastes a 6.75/10 🍉

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