HarperCollins —  Voyager
ISBN 978-0-7322-8604-0

We first meet Gerald Dunwoody when he is a Third Grade wizard working for Ottosland's Department of Thaumaturgy. Aha!, the cynic within shouted, but soon he is going to be the greatest wizard of all time. And, well, my internal fantasy novel hater wasn't wrong (but nor was it quite right either, by the way). For better or worse the fantasy genre has to deal with formulae. However, I keep telling myself that it's not really the inevitability of the story arc that is important. The enjoyment surely lies in how the story progresses from A to B.

And this story progresses from A to B to C and beyond at a neat pace and with plenty to keep the reader occupied. Gerald has to negotiate a few nasty scenes concerning an explosion at an exclusive wand-making factory, an encounter with snobbish colleagues, a run-in with a princess (who is also a prime minister), and encounters a mad king, a prince who is off with the ... er ... butterflies, an army of saracen-types and the gods of a different place: a lion, a bird and a dragon. And then there's the tiny matter of him being afflicted with every dread disease known to the mind of a fantasy writer, and days and days of torture when he would prefer to die but isn't allowed to.

Hmm, nasty business is afoot, wouldn't you say? Too true, too true, but it is delivered with good humour — I even laughed out loud a couple of times. The one thing that kept me going was that the book doesn't take itself seriously, but neither does it go so far as to be a parody of the genre. It is actually quite difficult to pin the beast down. Sometimes it hovers around the young adult reader level and then it swears itself back into more grown-up spheres, it sometimes soars aloft on purple prose and then pokes its tongue firmly into its cheek.

However, it's an easy, untaxing read and is, consequently, ideal for tired eyes at the end of the day. After a while I found that The Accidental Sorcerer had grown on me, becoming slightly addictive. I even took it to the gym to read while I peddled the bike machine and I started wondering if I'd read the whole series. Obviously Gerald had woven some kind of unexpected magical spell on me, or maybe the characters had seeped into my blood or something.

I found all the characters appealing on some level, and each left their distinctive signature on the dialogue. Reg, the magical bird, has the funniest lines, but she is also probably the most politically aware character in the novel, and is a pain in the arse, to boot. Personally, I liked the princess — an understated feminist, a scared little girl, a frustrated diplomat, a royalist snob. My internal cynic placed an odds-on bet that Gerald would fall in lurrrrv with her eventually. But (naa naa) the lurrrrving didn't happen the way my little critter guessed. Hurray! There's nothing worse than being too predictable.

As you may have guessed, fantasy is not the place I'd usually go to get my fiction hit but I'm pleased to have taken the detour this time. It's a wizard of a read. 

K. E. Mills is a pseudonym for a well-known writer around the traps.

The Accidental Sorcerer will be published in April 2008