(courtesy Hachette Australia)
It is said that you shouldn’t never judge a book by its cover (we all do, of course, but shhh, we’re not supposed to, so mum’s the word there).
But what about a title? Is that fair game for appraising how clever, fun and interesting a book has the potential to be?
Perhaps not always, but in the case of The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson, reputed at the time of publication to be the most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time, it is all and everything and the very reason you should first be successfully tempted to buy this wholly entertaining novel that also come with a hefty side order of life fulfilment, romance and a glorious sense of finding yourself for the first time, far from home.
The good news is that the deliciously quirky and highly amusing title is the just the first course in what turns out to be one of the best fantasy/sci-fi novels to come along in a while.
And while the title is a great and wondrously good lead-in (yes, we are more than a little bit in love with it, it’s true), it is backed by a novel that runs with the premise to a degree so profoundly satisfying that you end up laughing heartily at too many points to mention, finding yourself absorbed in a riotously good tale of adventure and derring-do, and wholly affected by what happens to one man when he finds himself in good old medieval England, with ho memory of who he is or why he is so far out of time, with only the singed pages of a book to help him.
I needed more information. I noted another person running up to them, carrying something. Scraps of burned paper. Most of the pages of my book must have blown towards the town, and someone had gathered them up.
All right. Mission accepted.
I needed those pages.
Complicating things still further, if being apparently flung back in history with amnesia is not complication enough, is that the fact that people from his own blighted slice of time are after him all while he’s trying to convince people from the village near where he lands that he’s not some sort of magical monster come to do them harm.
That’s actually a LOT for one man with a broken memory to deal with, and while memories of who he is and what he has done come back to him in alarmingly inconsistent and poorly-timed fragments, nothing of his deeply-buried past arrives fast enough to allow him to do much more than lie and improv like a budding theatre major in search of a fulfillingly creative career.
To go any further into the whys and wherefores of the story is to dive into spoilers so brilliantly, intensely, hilariously expansive that you may drown in happy, laugh-heavy wonder taking them all in, but suffice to say that The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England builds on a cracking good start to a story so well that you will marvel at how far and fast and fully Sanderson’s imagination works and what it is capable of bringing into being.
(courtesy X formerly Twitter)
Let’s just say that the back cover blurb is reasonably on point when it says The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England is a meeting of “Jason Bourne and epic fantasy” because in many ways that’s precisely what it is.
But it is so, SO much more, with Sanderson cleverly using all kinds of ideas to explore what it’s like to arrive far from anything you’ve ever known beforehand and discover that it’s actually more of a home than anything you’ve known before.
The man in question, who, yes, does have a name but not immediately, arrives in medieval England feeling a little disappointed with the course of his life; well, subconsciously anyway, since, naturally enough, he doesn’t know enough about himself to know how good his life is or isn’t.
But there’s a gnawing, desperate need deep down for him to be someone good, someone successful and together, and while some latent skills that he discovers when he’s trying to infiltrate a nearby very small village – everything is small here, including the size of kingdoms and anything claimed as a city – suggest he is equipped with some pretty nifty capabilities, he’s not necessarily sure he’s the hero he wants to be.
But he hopes he is that person because the people he encounters turn out to need his help a lot and if he can’t step up for once – or is this the latest in a long line of stepping up? Who knows but he really wants that to be the case – then what good is he really?
‘The fools!’ They won’t know what is coming for them.’
I kept walking, head up, back straight. Another lie. But at least I finally knew why I was so good at those. When you lived a life like mine, you got plenty of practice trying them out on yourself.
That is the brilliance of The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England right there.
It manages to be both quirky and silly and cleverly, intelligently fun and emotionally weighty in a way that zeroes in incredibly affectingly on the great need we all have to be worth something, to ourselves and to others and how when that evades us, as it has evaded the initially nameless hero of our tale, we feel like we’re not really going to ever amount to much at all.
Silly (but again blindingly clever) fantasy and existential story in the one compelling enrapturing and very funny story?
Believe it because The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England has it all, along with fantastically good artwork by Steve Argyle, some wholly inventive world-building that manages to be socially critical and comedically inspired all at once, and some thoughtful observations about how medieval men have hair straight out of shampoo commercials. (Forget medieval people being poorly bathed and dressed in rags: turns out they were one step off runaway models … well, kind of.)
As reads go, The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England is a marvellously entertaining and emotionally intense surprise that runs hard with its observationally hilarious elements, it’s good vs. evil adventuring which also turns out to be one big live action therapy session in ye older times garb.
This novel will surprise you and delight you and enthral you and make you wonder what might happen if someone kicked you right out of space and time, memories off with the pixies (or wights or elves as the case may be) and demanded you step up and the (very small) world all while trying to figure out who you are and just as importantly why you are.
If you’re curious for an answer, this novel is the book you’ve been looking for and who knows, in finding out who you are, you might just discover who it is who’d really prefer to be.