Books: The Eye of Zoltar By Jasper Fforde (2013)

 

“The Mighty Shandar, the most powerful wizard the world has ever seen, returns to the Ununited Kingdoms. Clearly, he didn't solve the Dragon Problem, and must hand over his fee: eighteen dray-weights of gold. But the Mighty Shandar doesn't do refunds, and vows to eliminate the dragons once and for all - unless sixteen-year-old Jennifer Strange and her sidekicks from the Kazam house of enchantment can bring him the legendary jewel, The Eye of Zoltar. The only thing that stands in their way is a perilous journey with a 50% Fatality Index - through the Cambrian Empire to the Leviathan Graveyard, at the top of the deadly Cadir Idris Mountain. It's a quest like never before, and Jennifer soon finds herself fighting not just for her life, but for everything she knows and loves.”

For a book sold as YA, filled with some standard tropes of the genre, The Eye of Zoltar, offers up a slightly darker tale, where bad things are happening to both good and bad people. It’s not grim, though, and death is seen more or less as easily accepted value –the consequences of people’s choices. It’s not there to shock people, in other words.

But what was once touted as trilogy, it seems odd that the supposedly last book took such an odd turn into typical fantasy trope of a quest (even if Jennifer does not want to call it that). It sidelines most of original cast of the first two books, including the Quarkbeast –a creature character that seemed almost as important as Jennifer Strange, but who seems now only be a minor figure in the arc of the series.

So this side-outing does not really propel the narrative of the first two books forward. Still, its enjoyable book filled with wittiness, the cleverness of its world, and some really well-drawn newcomers. I still wish he kept this to a trilogy, but I expect the next book, The Great Troll War to be worth the wait.

Well, in the sense, the paperback version is due in April. A lot of fans of this series had to wait eight years between the 2013 release of this book and the 2021 release of the last –and I’ve been waiting since 2009 for a sequel to Shades of Gray, which should see release in early 2024.

But there was a reason for the long break: writers block. Fforde was a prolific writer for a long time, but he would endure a two year spiral that nearly ended his writing career. As he noted to reporter Alice Cairns: “I wrote 12 books in 12 years, one after the other, and I thought I’d just carry on like that forever. Then, for no reason that I could see, I suddenly hit the buffers and the book I was trying to write (what was to be Early Riser) would not come out. The thing is, it gets worse the more you don’t do it. That’s when the doubts creep in. Is that it? Maybe 12 books is all I am ever going to do?

Early Riser would see a August 2018 release in the UK (February 2019 in the US), followed by the Constant Rabbit in 2020, The Great Troll War in 2022.