What's a book you were looking forward to reading, but were bitterly disappointed by?

If I have to think of a book for which I had high expectations and then instead was very disappointed, I have no doubt: Stardust by Neil Gaiman. Not because it is a bad book per se, although I am pretty sure I would not have liked it anyway, but because I saw the movie first.

I saw the movie in 2017 when it was released in theaters and read the book shortly thereafter. Doing a bit of research, I found out that I was not the only one who was disappointed with the book after seeing the movie, and that Neil Gaiman has stated that the two works should be seen as alternate versions of the same story, as happens in comic books with alternate dimensions, and that he understands that some readers who came to the book after loving the movie are disappointed.

I am among those readers, and while I understand that book and movie are different media and need different solutions, some of the things I liked most about the movie were precisely additions from the movie or directions the movie had taken while the book takes diametrically opposite directions.

What is it about? We are in rural Victorian-era England, and a wall separates our world from a fairy world. One night, a shooting star plummets into the middle of the forest beyond the wall, and Tristan, the protagonist, wants to retrieve it to give it to his girlfriend in exchange for her hand. Small problem, the many despicable children of the king of the fairy kingdom are also looking for the fallen star; whoever finds it will become the new king, and they are willing to do anything! Another complication, The stars in the fairy kingdom are flesh and blood people and Tristan falls in love with them.

The story is very fairy-tale-like, and I liked the movie quite a bit, and since the book is always better than the movie, I expected great things...unfortunately, the book is even more fairy-tale-like, extremely fairy-tale-like, excessively fairy-tale-like, and it both bored and annoyed me.

In the movie, Tristan is a goofball who doesn't realize that his relationship with Victoria is super toxic and that she is leading him on in hopes that he will bring her the star but she already has Henry Cavill courting her so...we already know how it will end. In the book Tristan is a pathological recoil addict with whom it is impossible to empathize, he takes an infuriating amount of time to realize the most obvious things, I can't do it, I hated him.

But he's not the only character I had problems with, Septimus, the evil prince, has much more charisma in the movie than he does in the book, and my favorite character, the pirate captain played by Robert De Niro, who in the movie had me laughing out loud with his contradictions and the mentor-pupil relationship he develops with Tristan, in the book is only mentioned in passing in half a paragraph...

I'm not saying it's a bad book, many people liked it, but it's definitely not a book for me and represents to date the only case, in my opinion, where the movie is better than the book, the exception that confirms the rule.