Started: October 15, 2023 | Finished: October 24, 2023
A Spell for Chameleon
A great new fantasy world introduced with less than stellar prose.
What a checkered book "A Spell for Chameleon" is - some parts are very good and some parts are very bad.
Let's start with the bad parts. The prose is clumsy and amateurish. The sentences are ungainly and do not build up to any level of intricacy; it's just plain and straight and flat. A lot of the incidents are ridiculous. When you think about them they seem to be very unlikely; and there are many incidents like this all throughout the book.
And now for the strengths. The worldbuilding is wonderful. The world of Xanth and its relationship to the non-magical Mundania is a fantasy creation worth the read. There is so much creativity in this book, gobs an gobs of it. Magic permeates all of Xanth, animate and inanimate objects alike, and Piers Anthony unleashes his imagination. The book is raunchy, and I like this, I like my fantasy raunchy rather than prudish. But this raunchiness does not dominate the book, rather, the book has a very whimsical vibe to it.
I feel neutral about the plot. There is never a dull moment in this storytelling; the pace is brisk, but some of the plot elements are clumsy but some of them are brilliant.
Another plus for this book is that there is more than forty others in the series to date. The fact that Anthony kept on writing about Xanth makes me want to read all the other books.