These are three more volumes in The Enchanted Forest Chronicles that Wrede
wrote in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I suspect the Harry Potter phenomenon
brought them back from dusty retirement as a way to fill up those tables at
the bookstore that have large signs saying “If You Liked Harry Potter,
You’ll Like These.” I’ve browsed some of those books and aside from magic or
the supernatural as a leitmotif, very little else is like Harry.

However, I’ve been on a young adult fiction kick lately and I did enjoy
these, so much so I actually stayed up late to finish one. They remind me
vaguely of a cleaned up, more innocent version of Terry Pratchett‘s Lancre
novels.

The books tell the story of Cimorene, the princess who’s run away from home
because princessing is too boring to be believed and has become the
voluntary captive of Kazul, the King of the Dragons. Kazul is female, by the
way, but King is a job description and not gender associated. There’s a
Queen who fulfills other functions.

In Searching for Dragons she meets Mendanbar, a reluctant King of the
Enchanted Forest, while on a quest to rescue Kazul from the Wizard’s Society
who are using Kazul to suck all the magic out of the Enchanted Forest into
their Wizard’s staffs. This is a bad thing. Unfortunately, Mendanbar’s magic
sword leaks magic, and while out of the Enchanted Forest
it stands out like a beacon on a hill for evil Wizards. Not to mention the
magic carpet that they borrow has transmission problems and keeps dropping
them all over the place.

In Calling for Dragons, Princess Cimorene has become Queen Cimorene and
she’s newly pregnant when someone, likely a wizard, threatens the Enchanted
Forest with destruction. Because the magic of the forest is tied directly to
King Mendanbar, he’s unable to do the heroic thing and go on the quest to
save the forest himself. Cimorene goes in his place, with the help of Morwen
the redheaded, pretty, and nearsighted witch, and Telemain the Sorcerer who
is really a magic geek speaking in magically scientific terms no one can
understand until someone translates for them. Sorcerers are different from
Wizards since they study all sorts of magic rather than specializing. And,
oh yes, the trio have help from a bunny who’s been enchanted to be 7 feet tall,
then eats magical donkey cabbage and turns into a donkey and then is further
enchanted to sprout wings and turn blue when he eats some specialized magic
ag products raised by Farmer McDonald who is diversifying his farm. The
bunny’s name is Killer. They return to a really frightful situation with a
war between the Wizards and the King. And the King is in trouble. Almost
best of all, in this one we get to hear what Morwen’s cat’s are really
saying when they meow.

Talking to Dragons breaks stride just a bit. The narrative switches to
focus on Cimorene’s son, Daystar, now 17 years old. One day, she hands him a
sword and sends him on a journey in the Enchanted Forest telling him nothing
except he will know what he’s suppose to do when it happens. And then he has
all sorts of adventures after meeting a fire-witch, a baby dragon and a
lizard named Suz.

One of my theories about young adult and children’s books is that the high
quality ones can be read by both adults and children with enjoyment. These
certainly follow that theory. I enjoyed them so much I told my daughter I
want them back for MY bookshelf when she’s done with them. Perhaps my son,
the Terry Pratchett aficionado, will read them as well.

The March issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now available. Enjoy!

I apologize for the slow rate of posting recently; I’ve been battling a nasty cold and haven’t felt much like writing (or much like reading, truth to tell). But I hope to be getting back in harness over the next few days.

This is the third of Barnes’ Jak Jinnaka series; I like it considerably better than
its immediate predecessor, A Princess of the Aerie, though not
as much as the first book, The Prince of Uranium.

In this episode, Jak Jinnaka is serving his time in his first post as
Vice Provost of Hive’s base on Deimos. Ostensibly he’s a civil servant;
really, he’s an agent of Hive Intelligence. His boss, the Provost, is a
wise and canny fellow who unaccountably likes living on Deimos, has two
ways of dealing with his VPs: either they are incompetent, in which case
he sacks them for the good of Deimos, or he arranges for them to look so
good they get promoted elsewhere. As the book begins, said boss is about
to take a trip to Earth, living Jak in charge. There’s bound to be a
crisis of one kind or another while he’s gone, so he tells Jak; if Jak
can rise to it, it will make his career.

A crisis does arise, of course, and a variety of funny, distressing, and
action-packed scenes follow, and as I say I enjoyed the ride.
Nevertheless, the series leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It
appears to be Jak’s fate to be double-crossed by everyone he trusts, and
in particular by his employers, and to be swept hither and yon by powers
too subtle for him to perceive until it’s too late. It’s as though
Barnes has a kind of anti-Heinlein thing going. Instead of a main
character who’s too amazingly competent for belief, we’ve got a guy whose
own desires are almost literally beside the point.

I enjoyed it enough to read the next one, if there is a next one, but it’s
still a little too cynical for my taste.

This one’s much better than the last Barnard I read,
Death of an Old Goat, better in every way.
The plot is better, the characters are better, the
mystery is better, and it doesn’t drip with scorn.
It’s true, the most obnoxious character in the book
is Australian, but you get the sense that she’d
have been just as annoying no matter what her origin.

It involves a young but promising opera company in the
north of England. They are just beginning their second
season with a staging of Rigoletto–and Barnard
clearly knows and loves Rigoletto just as much
as he (apparently) dislikes Australia. There are lots of
nice twists and turns, and it ends up quite satisfactorily.

One of the interesting things about Barnard’s work is that he
doesn’t have a consistent tone. Sometimes he plays for laughs;
sometimes he’s more serious; and in this one, it almost seems
like he’s trying to play Ngaio Marsh. If so, he
doesn’t quite make it…but the results are pleasingly
Marsh-like nevertheless.

An aging Oxford professor of English is travelling across Australia,
giving “guest lectures” at all of the institutes of higher learning
(so called) in that country. It is the mid-1970s; he wrote the two lectures he is
giving in the 1920s, when he was a young don, and has been giving them
unchanged, word-for-word ever since. He is deadly dull.

And at one of his stops, a particularly back-water sort of University
even for Australia, he is murdered for no discernible reason.

If you’ve detected a note of disdain for Australia in this review, it’s
simply because I’m trying to maintain the tone of the book itself, a
so-called “satire” in which Australia is shown to be in every way
dirtier, shabbier, and coarser than the mother country, even down to its
academic politics (which, heaven knows, are pretty shabby no matter where
you go).

But if, on the one hand, you’ve got a book that repeats all of the usual
pommie slanders, then on the other the mystery is fairly lightweight.

The book is, I hasten to add, well-written–the characters are all
marvelously well-drawn and very much themselves. But one doesn’t like
them, or the constant English snobbery, and the mystery does little to
make up for it.

Oh, well.

This morning I got the weirdest piece of spam I’ve yet received–nothing much, just a little text telling me that there’s now a web page for THE OLD ONES.

I usually ignore spam, but for some reason I clicked on the link. It took me to a web page for a Czech band called “The Old Ones” whose first album, Al Azif, contains songs inspired by H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. The leader of the band calls himself “Black Pharoah”.

What a weird and wonderful world it is, to be sure.

The Old Man in the Hat has acquired another verse. Now I need to figure out what to say about Weathertop…if anything.

I’ve found promising new blog; apparently it’s going to focus on linguistics, with excursions into linguistics in science fiction.

Ten extra credit points if you know where the title of the blog (and this post!) come from without peeking.

Having finished re-reading The Lord of the Rings, it seemed reasonable to
keep moving along and re-read The Silmarillion. And I’m glad I did; but at
the same time I find I don’t have much to say about it. It’s history
rather than narrative, and except for a few points (notably the story of
Beren and Luthien) I don’t find it nearly as moving as the trilogy.
There’s pleasure in it; but it’s a different kind of pleasure.