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A Malady of Magicks

Picked this up off a book swap shelf at a railway station, and now I understand why it was left there. Complete rubbish. The blurbs on the back cover claim readers will "laugh down the walls" and that "the field needs more humorists of this calibre". No, it really doesn't. The attempted humour in this book is clumsy, absurd and over-egged, and I say attempted because I never even smiled while reading it; the most I got out of it was an occasional eye-roll at Guxx's terrible rhyming.There's barely any plot, and no truly cohesive narrative; it's very clear even without reading the copyright page that half the chapters were pasted together from the author's other short stories - and that doesn't work at all well here.This book has been compared by other reviewers to Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. I don't recommend it to Discworld fans, or anyone else. The only real similarities between the two are the genre and that the cover art - which, frankly, is almost better than the story in this case - was drawn by Josh Kirby. There's really no comparison. Pratchett's sense of humour is subtle, edged, satirical and entertaining, where Gardner's is slapstick, about as blunt as his character's big club, and really not that interesting. The only reason I bothered to finish this was that I'm stuck on a train with little else to do. And I'll be putting it back on that railway swapping shelf, the very next chance I get.
Picture of a book: A Malady of Magicks

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