When I was in middle school, I'd watched and enjoyed the Disney animated version of the story, totally oblivious to how absolutely horribly Disney had "cleaned it up" for the children. Then one day, on the word of the day mailing list I'm subscribed to, one of the words had an example on its use pulled from the book. Just that one except was enough to totally floor me, I knew Disney really frelled with things, but I never remembered it being so extreme before. I had for some reason assumed the movie was more accurate than others because it was actually kinda dark for a Disney animation.

This revelation in hand, I went and found myself an unabridged copy of the book to read. I had assumed that since Disney chopped it up so horribly and changed things so drastically, I couldn't trust anyone to edit the story down, and didn't know what I was getting in for. From the start, I was noticing tons of things that Disney either edited out all together or drastically changed. I do think that if I give it another read, I will consider picking up an abridged copy, just because all the detailed descriptions of Paris and its architecture was just a little bit more than I could happily handle. Between slogging through that, the actual storyline was good.

The characters were interesting, it was easy to get frustrated with the ones you like because of the stupid mistakes they make, it's also easy to cheer with them if they manage something good. The book is dark, the ending sad, but I still highly recommend it. Don't be ashamed to grab the abridged version if you don't think you can handle chapters of nothing but geography and architecture in the city of Paris though, it was the only thing I regretted about reading the book.