4.0 AVERAGE


Jasper Fforde's Song of the Quarkbeast - The magical, adventure-filled and hilarious sequel to The Last Dragonslayer. Kazam is being challenged by iMagic, their magic company competition and whoever wins will be favoured by the King and have the monopoly on magic. They might even be able to get the mobile phone network back up. Our non-magic, foundling heroine Jennifer Strange just knows there is something more devious going on with the Amazing Blix, the king of the unUnited Kingdom...and just where and when will Kazam's missing manager the Great Zambini appear next to give them all some much-needed advice? Plus, should she go on a date with Youthful Perkins? Surges of magic that can send oak trees flying. Trolls out to rid their homes of human vermin ("here person person person"). A sneaky Quarkbeast looking for its other half. Big Magic, small magic, flying carpets, old grudges, new possibilities. It's explosive. Literally. Just read it - your sides will split with laughter and magic.

The second book in the YA series has Jennifer dealing with a magical contest with imagic over the control of magic in the kingdom. And of course the deck is stacked against Kazam with shady deals with the king. You do find out more about the workings of magic and about trolls and quarkbeasts as well. And the nice thing about this one is you really don't need to know anything about the previous book to read this one at all.

Another fun fantasy adventure that picks up right after the events of The Last Dragonslayer. I just love the world Jasper Fforde has built here and the characters feel like old friends. Oh, and I really want a quarkbeast!! My main complaint with this one, and from the little I've read of the third one, is a lack of continuity in places. Dragonslayer is set in the "capital city of Hereford in the kingdom of the same name" whose monarch is the nefarious King Snod. When Quarkbeast begins and Jennifer is summarizing the details of her world and the events of Dragonslayer the kingdom name has changed from Hereford to Snod with no explanation. This kinda threw me a bit, things like that are a pet peeve of mine, but I decided to overlook it. Then I finish this one and start the sample of book three and it happened again, the end of Quark and the beginning of the Eye of Zoltar don't match up. At the end of Quark Jennifer talks about all the repairs they made to zambini towers and in the beginning of Zoltar she says they didn't happen. Im not sure if it was intentional or just bad editing but it's a bit irritating in an otherwise wonderful series.

…for every evil genius there must be a ludicrously beautiful woman apparently doing very little by his side.

The Song of the Quarkbeast, sequel to The Last Dragonslayer is an absolute explosion of fun, adventure, chaos and sarcasm. It was a pure joy to read, and once again, I can feel the joy that Jasper Fforde felt in writing this. His humour shines through on every page and I think lovers of fun would be hard pressed to find something to dislike about this book, especially when it contains the last two dragons on earth; Feldspar Axiom Firebreath IV and Colin.

Once again, we find ourselves in the UnUnited Kingdom with our heroine Jennifer Strange. Jennifer is a foundling (orphans who are indentured to various businesses),and is still the acting manager of Kazam – a company of wizards that sell their magical talents to the public – while The Great Zambini, owner of Kazam, is missing due to an unfortunate bit of magical treachery.

Jennifer, who is often described as impertinent, must run the business; organising all paperwork and appointments and cajoling temperamental wizards into performing tasks they may deem too demeaning, or simply refuse because it is Jennifer, a foundling, asking them to. Jennifer has a lot on her plate and even more on her shoulders, but she manages to keep a fairly cheerful, calm attitude while still making the most of every opportunity for snark. She reminds me a lot of Veronica Mars in terms of personality and attitudes.

Appreciation for magic is thin on the ground in most countries of the UnUnited Kingdoms after some rather bad use of it a few hundred years ago. So now, all magic used must be registered with the appropriate paperwork and wizards, once seen as brilliant and important, are now relegated to finding lost things and repainting houses. More importantly than the lack of appreciation for magic is the lack of magic itself which has been steadily depleting for years.

Not only must Jennifer handle these everyday occurrences, but now she must also handle The King’s Useless Brother, the less than delightful King himself and The Amazing (who wants to be All Powerful) Blix, owner of iMagic (a competitor).
”What’s with the “iMagic” name change?” I said without preamble.
“Industrial Magic was a bit of a mouthful,” he explained. “Besides, putting “i” in front of anything makes it more hip and current.”



The Amazing Blix is up to all sorts of nefarious tricks – this time challenging Kazam to a contest of rebuilding a bridge the fastest. But of course, it wouldn’t be fun if that were all Jennifer had to deal with…There’s also the small matter of The Great Zambini reappearing for 6 minutes in the middle of troll territory, the discovery of a Quarkbeast (a very rare animal) in the kingdom of Snodd, the arrest of several of Kazam’s wizards and the Transient Moose has suddenly started talking. Phew! There’s certainly a lot happening in this book and all at break neck speed.

One of Jasper Fforde’s greatest talents lies in peculiarities. I am always delightfully surprised by what he manages to cook up and I am completely in awe of his imagination. From the Quarkbeast, a sort of rabid dog/dragon hybrid that can only say “Quark” to the Transient Moose, the result of a spell that makes the Moose be able to teleport around Zambini Towers at odd, yet oddly convenient, moments to The Thing in Room 346 there is no end of unusual and fantastically humorous side characters and plots to keep you amused for hours.

I love the Quarkbeasts. A Quarkbeast is a small hyena-shaped creature that is covered in leathery scales and often described as: One tenth Labrador, six-tenths velociraptor and three-tenths kitchen food blender. Jennifer had one as a “pet” in the last novel and it’s great to see them continue in the story. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding them and while I don’t know for sure that Jasper Fforde is going to reveal any of it to us, there is a definite aura of awesome surrounding them.

”I thought of leaving a Quarkbeast in the house at night, but, well, there are some things you baulk at doing, even to burglars.”
She was right. No one deserves a savaging by a Quarkbeast – or even being surprised by one when you’re off doing a spot of innocent villainy.


Fforde’s other, truly spectacular talent is for humour. As I mentioned earlier, Jennifer is awesomely snarky, but when you add in a torch that runs off sarcasm, mortal peril and all kinds of chaos, you’ve got a great recipe for laughs that cannot disappoint. As I said in my review of The Last Dragonslayer, above all else these books are fun and not only are you the reader having fun, but you can tell on every page that Fforde himself had fun which only makes the entire experience even better.

If I could, I would quote the entire book to you. Instead I must settle for hoping that you will pick it up for yourselves and leave you with these gems:

I was talking to the Transient Moose, who had suddenly materialised in the office over by the water cooler and was now staring into space and thinking grand Moosian thoughts.

”Snow…female moose…grazing…getting enough sodium and potassium in my diet…snow…avoiding being run over…snow…female moose…snow.”


…since the Kingdom of Snodd granted driving licences not by age but by who was mature enough to be put in charge of half a ton of speeding metal, no male under twenty six or wizard ever possessed a driving licence.


The King stepped up to the royal microphone and gave a long rambling speech that made reference to how proud he was that the hard toil of a blindly trustful citizenry kept him and his family in the lap of luxury while war widows begged on the street, and how he thanked providence that he had been blessed to rule over a nation whose inexplicable tolerance towards corrupt despots was second to none.


Why aren't these up to Fforde's normal standards? Is it because he's not so great at writing for kids? Either way, I'm thisclose to giving up on this series.

Again, a cute book in what I guess will be a series. Always quirky (or should I say, "quarky"?) and funny, the world of Kazam is a mishmash of technology and magic, and magic is making a comeback.

This book was mediocre, not that great. In summary:
What I liked
- the plot flowed smoothly
- the characters were good and there wasn't that many to confuse readers
- the love interest didn't ruin the plot in any way
- it takes place only 2 months after the first book
- there was footnotes at the end of the chapter to explain some things that are naturally part of the setting or to clarify something that happened in the previous novel

What I didn't like
- the characters aren't described in that much detail
- there is no new character development
- the setting is kind of limited and it's not described with a lot of detail

3 e 1/2*

Always a pleasure hanging out with Fforde.

This was better than the first book, and the first book was pretty damn good save for that ending where Jennifer had too many awesome powers and jobs.

I can see why the series got the name change from The Last Dragonslayer to The Chronicles of Kazam because Jennifer is no longer the last dragonslayer. Not because of dragons being gone, but because . . . she's not. There's not actually a reason given and there's only one reference made to her berserker powers as well.

But it's good! The novel starts off with Zambini Towers working sorcerers being called out to find a missing ring, a ring that doesn't want to be found. The client, or rather the client's representative, is secretive, but nice enough. After the job with the ring, Zambini Towers is basically forced into a magic contest by iMagic, a rival magic group led by the big headed "All Powerful" Blix, which will determine the future of magic in Kazam. Behind all that, there is also a plot with, surprise surprise, quarkbeasts.

All of this is tied up very nicely; I was incredibly impressed at how everything was woven together in the end.

If I had any complaints, it's, once again, that Jennifer sounds much older than sixteen. While the excuse in text is that foundlings grow up much faster than regular kids, I don't know. I can kinda buy it considering what Jennifer does and how she's in charge of things, but also, she's a sixteen year old girl.

However, maybe I was used to it after reading the first book because I barely noticed it. Everyone had their personalities and was settled into them. Tiger was pretty realized as a twelve year old foundling. I liked him a lot in this book because he asked stupid questions, but pointed out obvious things as well. Then there was Jennifer's love interest / sorcerer in training Perkins. I can't remember him from the first book (but I kinda can vaguely; it's complicated), but he was pretty cool in this one, and while I rarely if ever ship characters, I rooted pretty damn hard for him and Jennifer, and was a little heartbroken when she had to run off on him at the end to deal with another thing that came up.

The other wizards are pretty much the same as the first book, but we also see glimpses of more of the residents of Zambini Towers, including a glimpse of Zambini himself (which was very short, but he's become unstuck in time, so it's understandable). This impressed me a lot as well because the other residents felt like characters instead of one-offs and I hope that we'll see more of them in The Eye of Zoltar and The Return of Shandar.

I decided to read this now because the third book, The Eye of Zoltar was due out in the UK in April. I bought a copy of that and waited for it to get here. This is quickly becoming one of my favorite series.