More Puns, Less Poop Please

If you like potty humor, read this. You can’t go 2 pages without poop. On rare occasion peeing or farting might be substituted. This novel is basically a parody of the Princess Bride, except that Wesley or rather Worstley (brother of Bestley) gets pancaked by an Amazonian-like warrior who really likes rose gardening named Fia. She falls on him and for once the realistic thing happens even though Worstley may be the Chosen One thanks to Staph the Pixie. But since there is magic in this world, Fia hopes maybe he can be revived. So she takes up the quest along with Gustave, Worstley’s talking goat (courtesy of Staph) and Arabella the bard who was cursed by a witch to be half rabbit. Various ridiculous but totally recognizable adventures ensue if you’ve ever seen or read a cheesy fantasy.

I like the parody aspect, but the book could be about 30-50 pages shorter. There are also some good groanworthy puns, but these are kind of scattered. Take Grinda the Sand Witch. It took me an embarrassingly long time and Grinda saying, “Does he not like sand witches?” to get it. A few took me less time to get, such as two hopeful soldiers waiting for a cask of Amon Tiyado their master may have ordered to impress the king. There’s also Poltro incompetent sidekick who genuinely likes her master Toby the Dark (more like Crepuscular) Lord and whose nemeses are chickens everywhere. Toby can only summon bread products and dreams of being a fully accredited Dark Lord (he’s a few credits short) and achieving artisan crackers. One of the main group dies by smoothie (rather pointlessly), while another kills the presumably evil guy who murdered (?) Worstley’s brother and save the kingdom (from something?). Problem is they also kill someone they didn’t mean to which means losing the Chosen One aura, maybe.

Supposedly this is book 1, which means a series, but I really don’t see how that could be done. Sure there are some narrative possibilities for some characters at the end but it doesn’t seem possible that anyone would be able to write or read another 250-ish pages of poop jokes. As I said there are some entertaining puns, but those are pretty scattered. Maybe more puns and less poo next time.