This series made the big list of best fantasy books that came around a while back. It sounded interesting, so I decided to put it on my reading list. While this was a mistake, I learned a lot from these books: how to write a damn bad style. It is not the story, which is good. It is not the world, which is interesting. It is the execution: the characters are shallow and the writing style leaves something to be desired and if only there were a little less of it at times: Nothing is left to the imagination of the reader. The feelings of character's are named and explained in detail and they tend to change abruptly. The characters appear rough and unpolished. You can still see the good ideas but they don't shine.

Just a couple of quotes to prove my point

"This bothered Bink. He and Fanchon sounded just like Trent, offering better terms to a captive enemy in return for his cooperation. Were they any different from the Evil Magician?"

That final question is one the reader should pose himself, for the author it should be enough to imply the question, or should it not?

Or this one at the closing of a chapter:

"He drew away from her. "We have to remove the bombs. Carefully," he said. But what about the emotional bombs within him?"

This has to be one of the worst uses of metaphor that I have ever seen.

Also there's the part where Bink muses on how Sabrina could not have loved him very much ... I don't want explicit, I want description that implies what the author wants to say:

"Her love had not been deep enough. She had loved him for the magic talent she had been convinced he had, as the son of strongly talented parents. The loss of that potential talent had undercut that love. She had not really wanted him as a person."

One last minus is the latent women-hating all throughout the book. Of course many fantasy books have mostly strong male characters and the females tend to be decoration only. However Xanth improves on this by having the character of Crombie who hates all women. As he is characterized just as in-depth as the rest it leaves us with the feeling that it is absolutely ok. At the beginning of the second book it becomes even worse when the three heroes go on adventure to escape their wives.

However the pretty idea of everyone having their distinct magic talent - and I really enjoy Bink's talent which the author manages to keep from the reader for nearly the whole first book - and the interaction of those talents to solve their problems still make for a certain amount of suspense. So I did get started on the second book also hoping that the writing style would improve. So far ... not.