cdm72's Full Review: Terry Brooks - Magic Kingdom for Sale - Sold!
Don’t you hate it when people bring you books, shove them in your face, and say, “Here, read this, you’ll like it.” More often than not I don’t hate it, but I seldom LIKE it. Once in a while, though, you’ll meet somebody who knows your tastes better than you do. Case in point, Terry Brooks’s MAGIC KINGDOM FOR SALE--SOLD!. Terry Brooks is a fantasy legend, he’s practically royalty. But I don’t read a lot of fantasy. And from the titles alone, his SWORD OF SHANARRA series sounded like just the very thing I would avoid. After reading MAGIC KINGDOM FOR SALE--SOLD!, however, I may have to rethink my stance.
Ben Holiday is a rich, successful lawyer who’s lacking only one thing in life--meaning. With the recent death of his wife and unborn child, Ben has fallen into a very deep rut and can’t seem to find anything in his life worth going on for. Until one day a Christmas catalog comes addressed to his wife. He leafs through and spots an ad for a very strange item for sale, a magic kingdom, complete with damsels and dragons and wizards. Only $1,000,000. Ben has that, three times over. What the hell.
So he buys the magic kingdom, not knowing if this is all a hoax and he’ll be met by actors who put on a special effects show for him, or, really, WHAT to expect. What he gets is Landover, an honest to God magic kingdom.
However, the beauty of this isn’t what you’d think. Landover is fueled by a magic that is tied to its king, something it hasn’t had in 20 years, and the place is really falling apart. The weather sucks, the land is drying up, and the people . . . well, very few of them want anything to do with this new king.
So Ben sets out to make the most of the situation and prove to the people of Landover that he IS fit to rule them, and he’ll do it even if it kills him. Luckily he’s not alone, having help from court wizard Questor Thews, the man-turned-dog court scribe Abernathy, and the monkey-like kobolds who serve the castle Sterling Silver, Parsnip and Bunion. With these four in tow, Ben Holiday sets out on a quest to not only win the people of Landover but also to prove he’s got what it takes to succeed where others before him have failed.
As I said, I don’t read a lot of fantasy. Because what little I have read has all seemed like the same old same old crap to me, all of which I’ve already encountered in the Lord of the Rings. Okay, so I haven’t read those books, but I saw the movies and I know those books came long before any of the other fantasy crap I’ve read, and all that was full of mysterious strangers who turn out to be long-lost kings, or the dangerous quest to retrieve the magical talisman that will free the land of some evil, or some other plot device I know has been done before by Tolkein when these other guys were still in diapers, if they were even yet conceived. My point is this, most of the fantasy to which I’ve been subjected has sucked and hasn’t been very original at all. Now, given my admittedly limited knowledge of the incredible volumes of fantasy out there, maybe there’s nothing particularly original about this novel either, but there is one thing that does set it apart from the rest of the flock: Brooks.
I wish I’d known all along what an easy style he has. This prose is slick stuff, slides right off the page, directly into your brain with almost no effort. And it doesn’t seem like it’s because Brooks is dumbing it down for us, he’s just that good at what he does.
Another problem I’ve had with fantasy (a lot of which, I’ll admit, has come from beginners who spent a little TOO much time reading this stuff and not enough time expanding their horizons) is that most of what I’ve read reads like it’s trying to be fantasy, everything feels so . . . on purpose. If that makes any sense. But with Brooks, it all seems so natural. I meet Questor Thews and I don’t immediately think “What a stupid fantasy name”. Instead I think “Questor Thews, that’s absolutely right, that is his name, how could it be anything else?” Same with Abernathy, and Willow, and the Iron Mark, Nightshade of the Deep Fell, or the dragon Strabo, everything in this novel is written in such a way, with such believability, you don’t doubt any of it for a second. Having finished this novel, I believe 100% that Ben Holiday was a lawyer in Chicago who bought a magic kingdom and set out to become its king. I believe in Sterling Silver, I believe in Io Dust, I believe in Lake Irrylyn, I believe in the G’home Gnomes.
And I believe that Terry Brooks is secretly one of the funniest fiction writers working today. The humor in here is everywhere, but so subtle it really seems to sneak up on you in places. It’s brilliant. I loved this book.
Terry Brooks is anything but just another fantasy writer, his work will kick your face in. Immediately after finishing the book, I wound up at the library and found myself in the aisle with the other Brooks novels. I saw the 1000+-page SWORD OF SHANARRA collected trilogy and it was a struggle to keep myself from checking it out. The only thing that kept that book on the shelf were the 800 or so other books I have that still need read and reviewed. But mark my words, before long, I will definitely have more Brooks novels alongside this one.
After Ben Holiday purchased Landover, he discovered the magic kingdom had some problems. The Barons refused to recognize a king and the peasants were ...More at HotBookSale
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