Esk is the ultimate hybrid, even by Xanth standards. He is on a quest to Good Magician Humphrey s castle and meets up with the lion, the scarecrow, oops, wrong story. Esk meets an outcast centaur, a burrowing vole named Volney and a cast of Xanth s denizens as he tries to find the Answer that will allow him to stop the bank from foreclosing on his family s farm, err, protect his family from a demoness who is bedeviling him. Part buddy story, part coming of age and all predictable, although Anthony uses a sledgehammer to drive home several lessons about racism. Well Anthony is an incredibly skilled writer whose work has spawned an entire legion of copycats.
Puns flood the pages like a springtime Mississippi overflow, but they re funny.
And no author pays more attention to continuity among his work than Anthony. Those attributes are all present here. Even the moralizing that Anthony often does on any given subject is acceptable given that his prior Author Notes have shown him to be a man with deeply held convictions. Given the hullabaloo about Anthony s plotting, the story here is predictable and a bit boring. The aforementioned sledgehammer is swung with mighty force throughout this story.