This review is in the public domain. Books take their readers to other times, other places.
None do that so well as fantasy novels.
The fantasy author has the power of a god and can use it to build worlds that neither do, nor ever really could, exist. That's an awesome task by itself, yet the fantasy author, having built a world, must go on to the more mundane task of telling a story there. This is because, lacking anything familiar, the fantasy world may not easily generate events about which a reader will care. The great names of the genre have most often met this challenge by implicating tremendous issues that generate a sympathetic concern. Tolkien, the archetype, put the whole of Middle Earth into jeopardy and equated Frodo's struggle against Sauron with the transcendent battle of all good against all evil.