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Publisher:
(Tor UK) Macmillan UK |
Release
Date: March 2004 |
ISBN:
1405004843 |
Awards:
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Format
Reviewed: Trade Paperback |
Buy
it at Amazon |
Read
an Excerpt |
Genre:
Comic Fantasy [Brighton & Dartmoor, UK and Fantastic
Location etc] |
Reviewed:
2004 |
Reviewer:
Rachel A Hyde |
Reviewer
Notes: |
Copyright
MyShelf.com |
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Limbo
II
By Andy Secombe
Exactly a year ago,
Tor UK proudly launched Andy Secombe’s Limbo upon an unsuspecting
world. This was a delightful comic fantasy about a magical kingdom
and how it impinges upon Brighton and the Boggs family. Now they
are all back for a second (and sadly final) helping and once again
Limbo is in trouble. Perhaps it all starts when Queen Iris says
she is bored with perfection and wants to go back and work part-time
in their old newsagents. Or perhaps it is The Book, which is prophesying
doom once again. Add into the mixture a geneticist who wants to
create a biological computer, a visitor from the planet Thrripp,
the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and some Morris Dancers and
you have a good comic fantasy--something which all too often (in
this reviewer’s humble opinion in any case) is something of
a paradox.
I don’t even like comic fantasy as a rule,
so finding somebody who can make this sort of thing sing is a rare
and wonderful thing. For one thing, there is an actual plot around
which everything centers in lieu of the sequence of bantering wordplay
and broad farce other writers of this sub-genre go in for. Most
of the laugh-out-loud parts come from jokes about modern life which
have been deftly woven together with the fantasy and the fast-paced
adventure. Perhaps in some respects (the Four Horsemen, for example)
it is a little more like Terry Pratchett than the last book, but
not enough to be at all similar; the world has plenty of room for
both. Funny instead of merely silly, and actually rather clever
in many ways, I do hope that Andy Secombe will write something else
soon. There really isn’t enough of this sort of thing around.
Highly recommended.
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