I adore this book! Incredibly unique, I've never read a book with the plot of the characters being alive and having Readers read them. Goodness, what an adventure for the characters and what a journey for Sylvie. She learned what real life looked like to grow up and at the same time learned what her great, good thing in life is: to tell one great, good story to be shared with all people. I am shocked I did not know of this book before, beautiful read indeed.

This is a bit of an anachronism of a book. It was published in 2003 but has little to do with what has been going on in the wider world of children's publishing for the last couple of decades. What it most reminds me of is mid-century classics like Tom's Midnight Garden, The Children Of Greene Knowe, and (the slightly later) Charlotte Sometimes.

Like those examples it's oriented around mood, feeling and character rather than plot. That's not something you often see these days (not that I'm attacking current kids lit, I love it).

The words I most associate with these books is 'triste' and 'haunting'. Children's lit these days is becoming more strictly genre-fied, but this book harks back to a period when great writers were using the free-form state of children's literature to explore all sorts of territories. There are elements of fantasy, time-travel, ghost-story, and always a reflection on history. As with Tom's Midnight Garden or Green Knowe, one could call this book a fantasy or a fairytale, but they're not particularly helpful labels for these books. They're delightfully genre-less.

Like many of my favourite books, The Great Good Thing is a story about stories. It explores the relationship between writer, reader and character. Without sentimentality or tragedy, it did move me to tears at a couple of points. Again the word triste seems apt.

I can see that it's suited to a very particular taste, and while I would unhesitatingly recommend the book, it would be with the proviso that you're a reader who enjoys the kind of books I've mentioned above. Someone seeking a Princess-Bride-type meta fairytale will be disappointed (though there is plenty of humour): this book is thoughtful and gentle rather than a romp.

This book was really good. I will probably buy it to read to my 3rd graders. It's about a character in a book, Sylvie, who decides to take a look outside of her story. What follows are some great adventures. I think it will inspire my kiddos to become readers, writers and authors!

This book, despite being published in 2001, has an old-timey children's classic feel to it, kind of like A Little Princess or The Secret Garden, so if you like those books you may enjoy this. It's also a book for book lovers generally, as it's about what happens to book characters when they live inside a book that isn't being read and then come to inhabit the mind of someone who reads and falls in love with the story. It's about stories living on for generations, kept alive by being passed from one person to another. It's charming and dramatic and profound... if you don't think about it too hard.

Anyone who's followed me for a while knows that I'm a world-building snob. The world-building has to make sense or I can't fully enjoy the story. And the world-building in this book was an absolute mess. From the very beginning, it wasn't clear — when the book is being read, the characters get in position and say their lines and see the Reader's face looking down on them, but also they have to run to the right page and chapter and can take a nap next to a paragraph, so when they look around them, do they see woods or words? What happens if they say the wrong lines? Do the printed words change? Then we find out that if the book is left open, Sylvie can travel to the Reader's dreams, but if the Reader wakes up, that world disappears, except later when the characters take up permanent residence in the Reader's mind, they experience her dreams all the time and there's no mention of scenes suddenly evaporating into whiteness. And then when the book is reprinted in 40,000 copies, the characters freak out about so many Readers. But don't they just reside in one copy of the book, as evidenced by proximity to the sleeping Reader being relevant for seeing her dreams? And if they're performing the book, what happens if different people are reading different scenes of the book at different times? Also, did the Reader not already have the characters in her mind during the time that she was actively rereading the book, before they "crossed over"? And on and on. There was no coherent set of rules this fantasy world played by, and just having to accept what I was told was far less enjoyable than if the author had created an internally consistent world for the characters to inhabit. You might think I'm a nitpicky adult, but then you've clearly never read a book to a kid who keeps asking, "But how...?"

On the whole, it was a cute celebration of the power of books and stories that left me with too many questions to fully enjoy.

The Great Good Thing is the title of the book, the storybook within the book and the deepest desire of the story’s main character, Princess Sylvie, to do some ‘great good thing’. We read this delightful children’s fantasy tale back in 2002 as a family and I’ve never forgotten it.

In The Great Good Thing the book’s characters come to life as soon the covers of the book close. Although not a novel idea, it captured my imagination at the time and I enjoyed it on this reread, although perhaps not quite so much.

Princess Sylvie and her fairy tale family know their places and their lines. There are the king and queen, jester, ladies in waiting, thieves and all the usual assorted court personalities. Their greatest problem seems to be that they have very few readers anymore. Sylvie thinks she has an answer for this when an even greater disaster befalls the residents of the book and they find themselves in search of a new home. New homes present new difficulties. Now resident aliens in someone’s mind, the story characters rely on the person’s dreams to maintain their identity—not the most ideal arrangement under the best circumstances.

How our heroine saves her story for another day is worth discovering. A fun book for any lover of books.

I’ve loved this book when I first discovered it all those years ago. Reading it now I loved it even more. I think I’ve become even more nostalgic. It makes me so happy.

This is a sweet story with a 4th wall break that I usually recommend to my friends when they say they want to be authors or write stories. It has amazing characters, touches relevant themes, and has my fav lesson. Don't think about being an author. Write, write, just go it. It now has a new cover with the January 2025 reissue.

Book 1 of 3. The Sylvie Cycle series. Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn't get to live it very often.
Sylvie has been a twelve-year-old princess for more than eighty years, ever since the book she lives in was first printed. She's the heroine, and her story is exciting -- but that's the trouble. Her story is always exciting in the same way. Sylvie longs to get away and explore the world outside the confines of her book.
When she breaks the cardinal rule of all storybook characters and looks up at the Reader, Sylvie begins a journey that not even she could have anticipated. And what she accomplishes goes beyond any great good thing she could have imagined...
Grades 5-9. Lexile 620

Read this as a kid and loved it. Forgot the title for many years but always remembered this story. When I read Between the Lines by Jodi Picoult, I always wondered if she and Samantha Leer had read this book before writing their story.

One of the most magical and interesting books I read as a child, I still have my copy and revisit this one from time to time. The way it makes you feel changes as you grow up and you learn to appreciate something different about it every time. I would give this one 20 stars if I could.

The basic premise of this book is pretty easy to explain: it's a mix of The Neverending Story and Inside Out. While that sounds pretty cool, and the story has some neat twists on children's metafiction, it sadly doesn't work out quite as well as I had hoped.

What I really liked about this is that the story is from the point of view of Sylvie, the fictional heroine of the book within the book. And in fact the story sticks largely to the realm of imagination. When Sylvie and her family, friends, and enemies are still in the book, there's a lot of neat moments about what it's like to be book characters. It's rather like being a character in a play that might start or stop at any point. When the book is closed, the characters can wander from page to page and interact outside the scope of the plot. (There's light hints of romance between Sylvie and one of the thieves.) But as soon as the book is open, the characters have to rush from page to page to get to their proper places. I love how the illustrations and the text of the book are part of the environment of Sylvie's world. And I like that Sylvie wants more in her life than going on the same adventure over and over again.

The story really kicks off when a young girl starts reading the book again after it's been untouched for years. She falls in love with it, and when the physical book is burned by her brother, the characters escape into her imagination. At first they live near the borders of her conscious mind, participating in dreams, but over time they begin to be forgotten and set out to recreate their kingdom. It's at this point that the plot has the potential to become truly fascinating and different, because while the characters build a new castle and try to reenact their story, things are thrown off completely when the court jester overthrows the king. The jester is tired of telling the same old jokes and being looked down on, so he decides it's time to rewrite the story. While his methods aren't very nice, having the characters move in a new direction would be interesting, reflecting how people have to change and grow throughout life.

Instead, the plot turns into a sort of regression, as Sylvie moves through more mindscapes and eventually works to have her book republished, restoring everything to the way it once was. This is probably the least interesting direction for the story to take, as it allows all the characters to stay as static cliches. Even the jester is reset, and his complaints really aren't addressed at all. The story could confront the question of free will or even just explore the common children's fiction idea of being yourself, but instead the ending is surprisingly conservative by having a return to more or less the original order without really questioning whether this is good or bad.

There are a number of neat ideas here, especially in the beginning when the majority of the concrete worldbuilding is done. (I feel that the portion in a human's unconscious mind is sadly way underdeveloped.) Unfortunately I feel like the story that's told with those ideas isn't anywhere near as good or complex as it could be. I was really excited by a story like this told from the point of view of one of the fictional characters because I haven't really seen that before. I did take a quick look at what the sequels are about, and while I admit the idea of fictional characters dealing with the internet is interesting, I don't think it'd actually be done as well as I'd like, so I think I'll be leaving the rest of the trilogy alone.

What an odd but fun little book. It absolutely was not the story I thought it was going to be. I assumed we would do a hero’s journey to another magical land(which I do love) but actually we got a fascinating introspective of the passing of time and the concept of life, death, and memories. I didn’t love the ending but know finding out there’s a sequel it makes more sense.