Alas, it takes more than ballyhoo to make a book worthwhile Just to open ["The Neverending Story"] is to suffer disappointment and be vividly reminded that it began its life in Germany as a child's book, for how can anyone take seriously a book published in colored ink? Worse, the first letter of every chapter is muddily illuminated….

The contents match the packaging. The plot involves a small bookworm of a boy who starts to read a tale about an ever-changing quest through a strange dreamland, peopled with fantastic beings….

There are moments when Michael Ende's imagination takes wing, and he tells us of the terrifying "nothingness" that devours the landscape, and the huge luckdragons, "as light as a summer cloud," which "swim in the air of heaven as fish swim in water." But that hardly atones for the author's expectation that we'll take seriously a creature called...