"Air Apparent", by Piers Anthony (Xanth Novel)

SYNOPSIS: Hugo (Humfrey and the Gorgon's son) has disappeared. A mysterious body is found in the cellar of the Good Magician's Castle in his place. The Book of Answers is completely scrambled - and it's up to Wira, Hugo's wife (who is blind) to fix it all.

THOUGHTS: Convenient plot device, the scrambling of the Book of Answers. That was the best explanation for the complete absence of any cohesion or consistency in this book - nobody had any idea what they were doing. Unfortunately, the book also read as though the author was included in that group.

It started out fine - laying out the problem of Hugo's disappearance and Wira's reaction. However, it went rapidly downhill. Several elements were introduced that hadn't even been hinted at before. Hugo and Wira have had a spell on them preventing the storks from receiving any signals from them? Really? Who set it? Why? None of that's explained. It's just introduced as a handy MacGuffin to get Hugo into the basement for some Rhed Whine (to celebrate the Good Magician lifting the anti-stork-geas).
Hugo's problems with conjuring bad fruit are explained too. He couldn't possibly be just "not quite bright", oh, no, he's the victim of a seed of a mediocritree, which has been lodged in his ear for his entire life. Wait, what? How did that get there? No, no, no...on second thought I don't want to know. Really. His history indicates he's pretty much always been a little...slow...so I really don't want to know how that seed got into his ear.
I must say, though, that the bathing rituals in Xanth seem to be a little lacking, if he's managed to get through over 40 years of life with a seed in his ear, and nobody has even noticed (including him).

The Point-of-view cuts from Wira's Story to Hugo's are terribly abrupt and completely interrupt the flow of the story. Every single time the story jumped from POV to POV, I got jolted out of the story and had to take a few paragraphs to try to figure out what the heck was going on. Not a good thing if you're trying to enjoy the book. I found it more irritating than enjoyable, overall.

I did, however, quite enjoy seeing more of Happy Bottom and Fray, as they took strong supporting roles in this book. Their adventures were quite enjoyable to read.

The ending...oh my gosh, the ending. Do yourself a favor. Don't bother. Really. The ending winds up linking all of Ida's moons into an endless loop, and breaking the Earth / Xanth interface link forever. Sort of. Except through the moons. Yeah, it makes no sense.

And -WHAT a shock- the whole story is just another Demon contest. Wow, that plot device hasn't been used for every single book in the Xanth series lately. Seriously, when was the last time a Demon contest wasn't involved somehow???

Overall, I obviously didn't enjoy this one very much, and I may be giving the Xanth books a miss from now on.

BOOK RATING: 1.5 bones out of 5. And that's just because of the bits with Happy Bottom & Fray.