A princess and a wizard go on a quest to defeat demons, except that every word of that is wrong in some sense. The delight of reading this is seeing the different ways in which this is wrong and for whom.
What a joy to read, perhaps the best book I’ve read so far this year. It’s so many things all at once:
- An classic fantasy tale of unlikely comrades on a perilous journey and quest
- A commentary on how unrealistic stories like that can be without being painfully “meta” or breaking the fourth wall
- A galaxy-spanning space saga coming to a bittersweet end
- A delightful series of misunderstandings caused by entirely different viewpoints and contexts
This novella has so much more to say than so many other ponderous lengthy books, it seems like magic (or at least, it’s indistinguishable from magic, whatever it is)
