I read 8 or 9 books over Xmas and New Years, after having no time to read anything (for fun) during the fall semester. Most of my reading was non fiction, and most of the books were worth writing something about, if only to provide myself a way to remember that yes, I read that book, and here's what I thought about it. I've been writing a review or two each day lately, and I'm going to start posting them semi-regularly, since that's what I do. Most of the reviews are pretty brief, since there are a lot of them, and I've got a lot of other stuff to read, write, and process.
Today we start off with the only fiction tale in the batch. A book I read many times, and loved, when I was about 11. I hadn't seen it in decades, but hadn't forgotten it either
This is book one in the
Xanth series. Now up to book 30, with 31 coming soon.
A Spell for Chameleon, by Piers Anthony (1977)
Plot: 6
Concept: 9
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/7
Characters: 7
Horror: NA
Humor: 6
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 7
Overall: 7.5
This score is a lie and a hybrid. I didn't enjoy it nearly this much reading it over my Xmas vacation. However I remember absolutely loving this when I was about 12 and read it, and the other 7 or 8 books in the Xanth series (at that time), repeatedly. I hadn't read it or any of the others in at least 15 years, and when I happened to see it while browsing the fantasy section at the San Rafael library before my vacation, while looking for some fun, mindless reading, I couldn’t resist picking it up. Would it hold up? Was it as good as I remembered? Would I, as an adult, find Anthony's puns and jokes intolerable, as I feared?
Yes, no, and not really.
It's still a pretty good fantasy story, more in concept than actuality, but flaws and problems I never noticed in my tweens and teens now stood out clearly. Thankfully, the puns and word plays Anthony's famous for weren't so much in evidence here. He must have gotten more deeply into those as the series went on, since I remember any number of just awful puns in the later books in the series, and I only read up through 8 or 10 before growing out of them.
Xanth is a clever concept. It's a very small "world," a fantasy, magical, sentient land the shape and size (seems much smaller in this book) of Florida. Xanth is located somewhere and sometime on earth, but in no fixed place or era, since when humans enter Xanth they come from all different places and times. Everything in Xanth is magical, and almost everything is sentient. Trees, plants, animals, people, dragons, birds, etc. They're magical, or they have magic, or they are just a weird combination of different things. Plants that grow pillows, or steaks, or candy, or cast spells to ward off travelers, or lure them in. Animal/human hybrids abound, there are harpies and centaurs, and all sorts of dragons and giants and zombies and just about everything else you can think of in a comedic fantasy world.
The plot of this novel, such as it is, involves Bink, a young man of the largest village in Xanth. He's not yet manifested any overt magical talent, and since he's about to turn 25 he must do so soon, or else be banished from Xanth, into the non-magical world of Mundania. In desperation, Bink travels to Good Magician Humphrey, who is able to divine many mysteries, in exchange for a year's service. The story is basically one of those familiar fantasy road trip/travelogues, and we follow Bink as he goes to the magician, then travels out of Xanth, and back in again. He, of course, meets all sorts of interesting people and monsters on his travels, finds a love interest, makes friends and enemies, and gets into every sort of adventure and trouble.
It's a pretty good book one in a series, but it's occasionally obvious that it is book one in a series, as scenes and locations and characters are introduced and hardly used, but obviously set up to be of importance later on. It's also quite juvenile in a lot of ways; how sex is related to, for one. There's a lot of sex in the book, or at least the promise/hint of it, but in a theme that's continued through the rest of the series (as best I recall) all the sex is ridiculously (intentionally?) sexist and blushing in how it's depicted. Women are always teasing but coquettish, men are entranced into speechless stupidity, and there are never any details given. The main characters, almost always men, are always seem to be about 13, mentally, and are simultaneously enthralled, embarrassed, and obsessed with any thought of or prospect for sex. For that aspect alone, I'd call Xanth a young adult series, but in most other ways it's acceptable for or even targeted at adult readers.
I enjoyed reading it, and it goes very quickly; you can do 100 pages an hour without missing anything, but I wouldn't really recommend an adult get into the series at this point. Not with 30 books that I thought, even in my teens, were clearly going downhill past about #7.
Labels: book review
