The follow up to The Last Dragonslayer takes place a few weeks after the events of book one. Magic is slowly increasing, but not that much, and is still not trusted by a fair percentage of the population. It's subject to many rules and regulations.
However, a rival firm (iMagic) want to monopolise magic use in the kingdom and take over as the sole suppliers. There's lots of lovely moolah to be made if they can force our heroes out of business. They challenge Kazam to a magical contest and will stop and nothing to win.
Jennifer Strange and her friends can't let this happen, obviously, and face many obstacles on the way to the duel, including random curses, arrests and general incompetence (their own and other people's) and a wandering Quarkbeast that could spell cause a catastrophe all of its own.
On the way our cast is expanded from the first book, and the history of this version of Britain is fleshed out still further.
This is a hysterically funny read. Fforde has an almost unique gift for giving a genuinely good story along with all the jokes. His Nursery Crime novels offer proper who-dunnits alongside the surreal mayhem. This book is no exception. We (I do at least) genuinely care whether Jennifer and Tiger Prawns can bypass bureaucracy to keep Kazam open. I was genuinely upset when one of the funniest running jokes in the series came to an unexpectedly dramatic and moving end. As the plot unfolds we can see how carefully the various threads have been layered into the story.
The story moves with lightning speed and I raced through this in just a few hours. It's never less than amusing and is frequently laugh out loud funny.
If you want a quick, easy and brilliantly funny read, try this series - but do it in order. Things might get a touch convoluted.
No comments:
Post a Comment