K. J. Parker

This isn't the sort of book I would normally read because - apart from a few honorary exceptions such as Douglas Adams' Hitch-hiker's Guide - I quite often find humorous stories rather too heavy handed and to be trying too hard to be funny. However, this was passed to me by a friend who enjoyed it, so I thought I would give it a fair try. At first, I found this to be rather too overworked in the usual fashion, but after persisting was able to find the odd gem and to smile wryly or chuckle here and there. So not raucously funny, but fairly acceptable as a one-off.

I've just discovered it is the last book in a series, but it doesn't seem to suffer for that. Everything you need to know to understand the strange events transpiring are more or less explained during the course of the book, apart from the two odd people employed to deter the 'hero and heroine' at one or two junctures: I now realise they might be explained in an earlier volume. I use the terms hero and heroine loosely because the hero is the goblin King who is meant to be evil though didn't really come over as such and the heroine is his Elf woman sidekick who wants to become editor of the Elves' snobby newspaper.

There are a lot of jokes which are really poking fun at things in our world, although I thought the author was steering a bit too near the wind with a derogatory description of a well-known food product, considering that brand names are usually all right to mention in fiction as long as nothing negative is said. The cover is also slightly misleading - no dragons actually appear and no one goes around armed with a bow and arrow, least of all the heroine. Anyway, it was a decent page-turning read and would probably appeal more to readers who really enjoy comedy fiction. A solid 3 star rating therefore.… (lisätietoja)

Having greatly enjoyed the first two books of this trilogy, I regret to admit that I was a little underwhelmed with the book that rounds everything out. Note that I don't say conclude, in that Parker introduces a new character (Felix the embassy translator), who suddenly finds themself trying to survive the fall-out from the events of the first two books; though the reader is given some sense about what happened after the earlier stories. Like the protagonists of the first two books, Felix also rises to the occasion, but his trials just don't feel as gripping, at least to me. This is not to mention that I think I see a better way to connect this novel to the previous books, in regards to Parker's agenda of drolly commenting on the fragmentary ways history comes down to us.… (lisätietoja)