The third book in the Xanth series, Castle Roogna follows the adventures of Dor, the 12-year-old son of Bink, main character in the previous two. With a Magician-caliber talent from birth - the ability to speak in inanimate, non-living objects - Dor is being prepared to take over the throne when the time comes for King Trent to step down. Unfortunately, the other kids like to make trouble for him because of it, and people in general avoid him because of how easily he can find out the things they'd rather keep secret. It's no help that his parents are always away on the king's business, either, and puberty makes itself quite the nuisance when Dor begins noticing just how attractive his no-longer-a-ghost nanny is.

A suggestion made to help get his mind off things and help better prepare him to become king turns into a quest through time that offers up a new set of problems. Thrust into the body of a fighting man, Dor starts out half-heartedly on a quest to reunite his nanny with the man she loves. Before he can accomplish that, though, he get mixed up in dangerous game-turned-war over Castle Roogna that occurred 800 years before he was born, as well as resist the charms of the vary doomed woman he's trying to help. And his greatest ally in his adventure? A giant spider by the name of Jumper who's only along by accident.

People who enjoy fantasy worlds, puns, and irony would be likely to love this book. The land of Xanth exists alongside normal Earth (otherwise known as Mundania), though it isn't really in any one spot. It is a place where numerous "myths" are the reality its inhabitants know, a place filled with danger and oddities, and where every person has a unique magic talent. Things that appear range from dragons and ogres to trees that grow shoes and cottages made of cheese (yes, cottage cheese).

To be honest, I'm only really even doing this review because I absolutely adored the character Jumper. As a middle-aged spider, he has to learn a bit about human customs, but he keeps pretty well open-minded to everything. Dor initially teams up with him after accidentally dragging him along into a tapestry that brings them to the past (which is how Jumper ends up seeming so monstrously huge). As they continue on their journey, a deep friendship develops between the two as, time and again, Jumper's forethought and more mature mentality saves Dor, helping him through both inner and outside turmoil. The spider proves to be a most amazing creature, risking his very life to assist his friends on more than one occasion.

I'm fairly easy to please, so I don't really have anything much to complain about. If I had to think of something, it might be how abruptly the book ends, but even so it managed to completely the story well enough.

Locate the next books, and befriend a spider.

It's a pretty fun book, overall, as are the others I've read in the series. The setting and characters allow the book to bounce back and forth between drama and its more comical bits. It also offers interesting reasoning for different myths and types of magic, providing a world that has its own logic. Also, while I'd suggest reading them in order to decrease the risk of spoiling earlier ones be reading later ones first, the important stuff is easy enough to follow that reading them in order isn't necessary.

There would be three reasons I can think of why it might not be good for a person to read these books.

1. If the person in question is a child. The reason is that the books tend to allude to adult-oriented topics, enough that a person who isn't familiar with such topics would no doubt wonder what it was the book was talking about. There's nothing excessively blatant, but it is certainly there.

2. If the person in question is a stickler for realism. These books are very much fantasy, and there are things than can only be explained by "blaming" magic. I think there may also be some errors in continuity, but the series does span a number of years (and that's not including the trip through time). If you go in with an open mind, though, there should be no problem.

3. If the person in question is a strong feminist. I don't remember any major problems in some of the later books (it has been a bit), but the first few have a number of male characters (including the leads) who have similar ideas about women. While there's only one who actually talks bad about females (being a woman-hater is just a part of that character, and it is actually used in plot-points), Xanth is very much a patriarchal land that will only have a male Magician as King, and there's a definite feeling that females are supposed to be delicate creatures.

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Created May 24, 2009 at 8:30am • Submit your own review...