Magic Kingdom For Sale - SOLD! by Terry Brooks
An enjoyable, light-hearted fantasy novel that I'd somehow missed, by a well-known name in the genre.
When I was a teenager, Terry Brooks novels were everywhere, and it seemed to me that every one I picked up was book 7 of the Long-Winded cycle or part 2a of book 4 of the second quintet of the High Fantasy Epic. Undoubtedly if I look now I'll find he'd only written four novels by then but in a way it doesn't matter. The point is, I avoided his work. I associated him with Anne McCaffrey and David Eddings (both of whose prodigious output I had dipped into on the recommendation of a friend with whom I have overlapping reading tastes) and I assumed he wrote the sort of po-faced high fantasy I couldn't stand, slightly wet with an unsubtle moralistic overtone, spread over a dozen volumes.
On the basis of Magic Kingdom For Sale - SOLD! it seems I may have been wrong (it does happen occasionally). It was a quick and easy read, laced with humour (by no means comic fantasy, but definitely not always straight-faced) and with a few original twists to its comfortable tale of dragons, fairy magic and quests.
Ben Holiday is a lawyer in Chicago with a successful career, millions in the bank, a flash apartment (this being the 80s, that means a lot). Trouble is, his wife died a couple of years ago, he's staring 40 in the face, and he's beginning to wonder what the point of it all is. The answer's either suicide or a long break from his old life, so the advert in the Christmas catalogue offering a kingdom (complete with dragons, fairies, wizards and knights) for a million dollars seems too good to be true. And we all know what they say about things that seem too good to be true.
It hasn't made me rush off to read all those Terry Brooks books I dismissed out of hand all those years ago, but if you're a high fantasy reader who also doesn't mind the odd Terry Pratchett or Tom Holt, you could do much worse than to read this novel. (If you're wondering how come I picked it up in the first place, a friend mentioned it then I noticed it in the library a couple of weeks later and thought why not).