DEC - Magic Kingdom For Sale--Sold!

December review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: Magic Kingdom For Sale--Sold! by Terry Brooks, 1986. [Published Before You Were Born category]

This is probably one of the most open-ended of categories, "published before you were born" (which for me is 1991), and that's possibly why I left it until the end of the year: I couldn't make a decision with all the possibilities that were given me. For a while, I toyed with the idea of going back to a classic, something I've chipped away at but never fully finished, but I ultimately decided to go with a quick, fun read and Magic Kingdom For Sale fit the bill. Magic Kingdom For Sale--Sold! by Terry Brooks is his first post-Shannara endeavor and one that cemented his status as a solid fantasy writer in the 1980s. It tells of Ben Holiday, a jaded widower and high-powered lawyer who is bored with his life when he comes across an advertisement in a Christmas catalog, promoting the sale of an honest-to-God magic kingdom for sale for the very low price of one million dollars. Unsurprisingly, Ben decides to take this strange offer, and very soon we are in the magical kingdom of Landover, where everything is pretty much dying and only slightly resembles the blossoming land that was promised.

We follow Ben on his journey from high-powered Chicago lawyer to bumbling king of a failing magical kingdom, and it seems that everywhere Ben turns, things are going to hell. His less-than-skilled court magician, Questor Thews, accidentally causes him to sleep away 7 of his 10 allotted decision-making days (he is allowed to back out with only a nominal fee within 10 days of acceptance of the mantle) and no one in the land is willing to recognize a new king. Something called The Tarnish is eating away at the kingdom, something Questor associates with the lack of a rightful and capable king. Ben has to try to secure the pledges of the various powers in the land, all the while attempting to convince them that he is worthy of their pledge as well. The cast of characters Ben accumulates over the course of his journey, both in his band of followers and in those he meets on his journey, are each unique enough to remember, but not entirely deep enough to have significant development or character arcs. Everyone stays pretty much the same, pretty much the way you knew they were going to be from the beginning, if that makes any sense. Rather, the character development is expected rather than organic. This is the way Ben and Questor must come to think because this is the way the story must end. And I am not saying this in a negative or derogatory kind of way: sometimes you just need to know where a character is going. As is to be expected, there is a point in Ben's quest where he has to go where everyone has spent the entire book telling him not to, and it is here that he truly understands the man he is supposed to be in order for this whole kingship thing to work. Like I said, relatively unsurprising, although entertaining.

Magic Kingdom was most definitely a "lighter fare" fantasy read, something I could dip into every night before bed or on the bus on my way to work without having to rebuild an elaborate world in my head prior to opening it up again. Brooks's prose style is very straightforward, very telling, although he is capable of quite the turn of phrase. It was an excellent choice to cap out the year, reading by the fire while the snow blew and all those winter cliches, and it was fun to see an early Terry Brooks try his hand at something smaller.