"The Tough Guide to Fantasyland" by Diana Wynne Jones

Well, that... wasn't what I was expecting.

 

I suppose I should have expected it to be written like a guidebook, seeing as it's "The Tough Guide to Fantasyland" and all. But I didn't.

I don't actually have a lot to say about this one. Not great (unlike Howl's Moving Castle or its as-yet-unreviewed-by-me sequel, House of Many Ways, its humor doesn't actually act like humor to me); not terrible (unlike the as-yet-unreviewed-by-me-because-it's-super-awful Ice Wolves, which I have yelled about peripherally.)

But anyway, I suppose it's a sort of spoof of bad fantasy. It's a guidebook to the titular Fantasyland, including entries on "Chilblains" (nobody ever gets them), "Horse" (the kind of horse-that-acts-like-a-motorcycle-with-legs you find in bad fantasy books), and many other things. If you have the type of sense of humor to enjoy it, it's probably great. It just... didn't work out for me.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T to M. I should really just come up with another rating, something like "T15+", for things like this and The Great War and Fahrenheit 451 that get rated "T to M".

As you may have guessed from my review, this book gets two stars. My appreciation of it was really more two and a half, but I round down for these things.

 

Favorite lines: 

 

  There's a heading near the beginning of the book called "Other Tough Guides", none of which actually exist. My favorites are "The Tough Guide to Boating on Mars", "The Tough Guide to Transport in the Multiverse (mostly by Telephone Box)", and "The Tough Guide to Black Holes (unaccountably missing)".

Link to the actual post.