Well-Tempered Clavicle

Well-Tempered Clavicle by Piers Anthony, 320 pages

“Picka Bones and his sister Joy'nt are off in search of adventure with three creatures newly arrived from Mundania--and not the sort of creatures you might expect! Join them in a madcap quest, in this 35th tale of the land of Xanth.”  The author revealed in the note at the end that his daughter dies while he was writing this book and wasn’t sure if it had the same quality as the previous books.  I did not think that the story suffered, but the editing left a lot to be desired.  There were a lot of small mistakes that should have been caught and corrected because they were distracting, but overall, this was still a fun story and fans of Xanth won’t want to miss it.  Fantasy fans who are new to Xanth should start at the beginning anyway, but this is not the book to start with if they are jumping in to a later book.

The Source of Magic

The Source of Magic by Piers Anthony, 326 pages

The Source of Magic continues the Xanth series. It also continues the weirdness that is the Land of Xanth. As anyone can probably guess by the title, this story focuses on Bink’s quest to find the source of all magic in Xanth. To do this he brings along some familiar faces from the first book like magician Humfrey, Chester the centaur, Crombie of the king’s guard and a new character named Grundy who is a golem.

Again the book is filled with puns and play on words. Examples would be butter flies actually produce butter, stag beetles have antlers, breadfruit trees produce bread, etc. There are also many strange creatures like mind controlling brain coral, vegetarian ogres and an ouroboros (mythological serpent that refuses to let go of its own tail). Perhaps the strangest is the demon known as X(A/N)^TH. I can’t say much about X(A/N)^TH without spoiling part of the story, but I will say he takes his games very seriously.

The novel is very fast paced with action happening in every chapter. So far the series has been worth reading and I have enjoyed the novels and characters.