by Jasper Fforde
Recommended Ages: 12+
We've met Jennifer Strange before. In previous adventures, she has risen from a mere orphan sold into indentured servitude to acting manager of Kazam, a house of enchantment in the bizarre Kingdom of Snodd (roughly Herefordshire, in the UnUnited Kingdoms). Then, in quick succession, to the title of dragonslayer (later ambassador to the dragons), then Royal Mystician, and now ... well, we'll see what she becomes as this book unfolds.
Fiercely protective of her wizards' independence, though she has no magical abilities herself, Jennifer accepts a challenge from the Mighty Shandar, a powerful and all-but-immortal wizard who threatens to exterminate the last remaining dragons. She is to find a legendary, goose egg-sized gem called (surprise!) the Eye of Zoltar. Problem 1: It's legendary because it's not very likely to exist. Problem 2: If it does exist, it seems the one wizard who knows where it is lives in a neighboring empire (a seriously dystopian version of Wales) that is known for, among other things, "jeopardy tourism" – where people pay to risk being eaten by wild animals and/or cannibals with a funny thing about taxidermy – and, for another example, kidnapping people and holding them for ransom. Problem 3: The likeliest location of the legendary gem seems to be the lair of an even more legendary sky pirate, in the most-legendary-of-all secret burial ground of flying leviathans. Those are probably more than three problems, to be honest. But even bigger ones will face Jennifer and her traveling companions, problems they won't know about until they're in the thick of them.
Those companions include a spoiled princess who has been body-swapped with a starveling maidservant, a recently licensed wizard who has been trying to take Jennifer out on a date, a 12-year-old guide who has seen more than anyone her age should, and several other more or less unwelcome additions to their party. They set out, knowing (thanks to a type of premonition that tends to be statistically accurate) that 50 percent of them won't make it back. And after they pass a certain point in their trip, the statistics in favor of survival go down to zero. I won't sugarcoat it. Several of these characters come to gruesome ends.
The rest of it I wouldn't spoil for all the world, except to hint that the more you know about the Mighty Shandar, the less you like him. Along the way, Jennifer and Co. encounter strange beings, deadly creatures, terrifying magics and awesome scenery. There's a "leap of faith" bit that'll give you the heebie jeebies, whether you've seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or not. There's a city that seems to exist for the sole reason that two railroad companies are fighting an actual war to be the first to reach it. There is a subversive thread of economics running through the book, which seems for a while to give the princess something to be hilariously good at but that turns rather dark later on. And finally, the ending has the kind of rushed grimness that cries out for a fourth installment.
Coming on the heels of The Last Dragonslayer and The Song of the Quarkbeast, this is the third book in the ... well, depending on where your edition was published, it's either "The Chronicles of Kazam" or the "Last Dragonslayer" novels. How to shelve it is only one of several textual problems for this book. Apparently it had more than one working title prior to publication, including Strange and the Wizard (so Google's AI tells me) and, according to a footnote referencing it in the second installment, The Return of Shandar. Then there's the fact that this episode comes to a cliffhanger ending and it took Fforde seven years to pen the fourth and concluding installment, The Great Troll War. At least we're on the other side of that long interval, which seems to be a theme for fans of Fforde's fiction; there were even longer waits before the latest installment of the "Thursday Next" series (14 years!) and the sequel to Shades of Grey (15 years!), a pause during which this book and The Constant Rabbit of a year prior were the only new titles he put out. I hope Fforde's recent rush of productivity continues!
