Charmed Life
Guardian Award winner and the launch of Chrestomanci: the wittiest of the great British children's fantasy sequences and a visible ancestor of the boarding-school-magic boom that followed two decades later.
Book Entry · Fantasy
Magic Kingdom for Sale — Sold!
by Terry Brooks · 1986 · Magic Kingdom of Landover, book 1
What is Magic Kingdom for Sale — Sold! about?
Ben Holiday, a Chicago trial lawyer hollowed out by his wife's death, finds a kingdom listed in a luxury Christmas catalogue: Landover, one million dollars, magic included. It is not a scam, exactly — there is a kingdom — but the treasury is empty, the barons won't kneel, the dragon is at large, the court wizard's spells misfire, the scribe is a talking dog, and twenty previous purchasers have been refunded or eaten. Holiday's grief-stricken decision to stay and actually do the job turns catalogue whimsy into one of fantasy's better midlife-crisis novels: kingship as the ultimate career change.
Why it matters
A long-running bestseller that proved Brooks beyond Shannara and helped establish the comic portal-fantasy lane later occupied by everyone from Pratchett's imitators to isekai.
Where does it sit in the series?
A burnt-out Chicago lawyer buys a magic kingdom from a department-store catalogue. Comic fantasy with a midlife crisis at the controls.
In the Guide from Magic Kingdom of Landover:
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