A fantastical tale of wuv — true wuv — that leaves in only the good parts
The core of The Princess Bride, as every fan of the beloved movie knows, is a classic swashbuckling adventure, with one candy coating of romance under another of comedy. Buttercup, heartbroken after her childhood sweetheart dies at sea, agrees to marry Prince Humperdinck — not for love, but because the kingdom needs a queen. That promise is threatened when shadowy warmongers commission a motley crew, consisting of a hunchback, a drunk and a giant, to kidnap the bride — only to have that abduction thwarted by the black-masked Dread Pirate Roberts. The story only gets more fantastical from there.

The story is so inherently cinematic that you may not be surprised to learn that the book was written by the Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman. (He also wrote the screenplay, which is unusually faithful on a scene-by-scene, zinger-by-zinger basis.) The book, which is written in a breezy, economical style, takes the core story and embellishes it, not only adding incident and backstory, but also providing Goldman's own anecdotes and annotations under the pretext that he's revising a staid manuscript to only include "the good parts." Fans of the book consider all this stuff so rich that many dislike the movie for excluding it, and those folks may have the same beef with this audiobook — it's abridged in such a way that it tells almost exactly the same story as the movie. (It's even read by the movie's director, Rob Reiner, who's charming despite the fact that all his voices are all basically variations on Meathead.) The true test of any adaptation or abridgement is how well it stands on its own, however, and the audiobook delivers its laughs and thrills every bit as well as the movie.