Read this to my daughter recently. A very mixed bag. 
 First off I should say that although the book was written in 1979 it reads as though it were written in 1939. The translator has consistently reached for the most complicated/high falutin' word available and as a result the child's book ends up unreadable/incomprehensible to many modern kids. I'm not one for dumbing down, but this goes the other way pointlessly. 
 I saw the film around the time it came out years ago. The book seems to reach the end of the film by about half way through. That first half is cleverly done with a good idea about binding the reader and the adventure together in a 'meta' way that works out really well. The pacing is ok, the imagination great - chaotic, but good. 
 For me Ende should have stopped there and wrapped it up. 
 The second half of the book feels... never ending. It's a slow, overdone, meander through a fairly arbitrary world and the 8 year old I was reading it to (we finished the book on her 9th birthday) was, like me, less than gripped. We soldiered on... and on... and on. 
 Eventually the massively drawn out moral lesson / reconstruction of our hero's personality completes and the final scenes of reunion are quite touching and uplifting. 
 So the first half was a 4* for me, the second half a 2*. 
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