THE LUCK OF THE WHEELS By Megan Lindholm

THE LUCK OF THE WHEELS
By Megan Lindholm
Voyager (Harper Collins) - July 2002
ISBN 0007112556 PB
Fantasy
Fantastic Location

Reviewed by Rachel A Hyde, MyShelf.com
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This is the fourth and last of the excellent Ki & Vandien Quartet, first published back in 1989. There is nothing quite like these books, which have abandoned the usual fantasy formula about quests, battles and prophecies on an epic scale to hone in on something smaller and more involving; the everyday lives of a pair of haulage contractors. Ki and Vandien travel around in their gypsy caravan arriving in strange new towns and undertaking to take a cargo to another place. Always though they end up getting involved in some larger scheme and the stories are admirably succinct, gripping and inventive, set in a well-realized world which humans share with a number of other sentient races. Megan Lindholm writes about all this as though she has been there herself.

This time, the pair arrives in a small, dusty town and is paid a surprising amount of money just to take a man's teenage son to be apprenticed as a healer to his uncle in a town some days distant. It all sounds ridiculously easy until they meet the boy, an unprepossessing mixture of human and other species names Gotheris, but nicknamed Goat. Thus begins a journey involving a stowaway girl, the unpopular local Duke, a gang of conspirators and a lot of trouble. As ever, it isn't just the plot that holds the attention - although this is another real page-turner - but the minutiae of daily life and the uncanny sense of reading about a real place that we can see unrolling through the author's eyes.

Sadly, this is the last of the series. It is a pity to forsake such an unusual twist on the fantasy theme for the more standard trilogies of tubby tomes about people on quests in the author's admittedly fine later work.