Are you ready? I sure hope so! Let's start from Chapter 1: Adventurers Wanted!
You can't judge a book by its cover, but I have to admit, the cover for this one is pretty boss. You've got a giant fire-breathing dragon sliding down mountains of treasure. Magic and dragons! Two of my favorite things! The side gives us a shrunken picture of the dragon's head, and helpfully informs us that this is "Book One." Promising. According to this, we can thank or blame a man named M.L. Forman for this.
But enough gawking over the cover art; let's crack 'er open!
WOAH! And the book jumps us in the back alleyway right from the start, beginning with "Alex and his friends gathered around the dark opening, preparing for what they had to do." Well, if we're getting right into the action from the start, this can't be so bad, can it? It's some kind of cave of some kind. We know right off the bat that his has to be eeeeevil, because it reeks out loud. Nonetheless, our brave heroes are ready to do this.
Or are they? Alex is having second thoughts—for everything that's happened the the past few months is a dream that's slowly beginning to become a night... mare.
Oh crap. This is a How We Got Here opening, isn't it? We're going to have to wait 20 chapters to get to anything remotely this exciting, aren't we?
Someone named Bregnest urges them forward. What they are about to do is either incredibly brave or incredibly foolish. ...I don't like his name already. It looks too much like "Pregnant." I can tell you right now, "Bregnest the Pregnant" is not a good adventurer name. Once we figure out what your role in the story is, we'll give you a better one.
Someone named Skeld is with them as well, and he's willing to trust fate. Ehh... For a fantasy name, Skeld is respectable. You can keep your name.
Luckily, li'l Alex isn't scared, because he's gonna do this all with his friends and they've been through much together.
Oh boy. Ladies and gentlemen, as we cue off our flashback about how he became an adventurer, let us introduce: Our Protagonist.
Our hero is named Alexander Taylor. Alexander: Means "Defender of Mankind." It takes real conejos * to try and pull off a hero with that kind of name. It can be done: One example that comes to mind is Alexandra Roivas from Eternal Darkness. But she works because she's an unconventional savior. And not unconventional in the way a lot of authors seem to think equals "unconventional," but I mean really. She's just a girl whose grandpa just died, and she's still kinda hurting from that because he helped raise her. She's only OK with a gun and a sword, and her main "superpower" is basically that she sees so many horrifying things in the Tome of Eternal Darkness that she builds up an immunity to madness.
In our first page of being taught about this Alex, we learn that he's moping about being scolded for... breaking glasses.
So his stepdad and stepbrother live above a tavern called the Happy Dragon. (Happy Dragon wasn't old, but he was a dragon...
) His stepbrother, Todd, was goofing around, some stuff broke, and Alex always gets blamed when stuff like this happens and it makes him feel so this and feel so that. That Makes Him Feel Mopey.
In the next few pages, the narrator permanently affixed to Alex's shoulder tells us everything there is to know about him: His mother died when he was little, he always calls his distant step-father "sir" or Mr. Roberts, his stepbrother Todd always disappears when things go pear-shaped, leaving Alex to take the blame for everything, but the two of them would "do anything for him." Oh, and Alex has lovely sandy hair and blue-green eyes. All he wants is a change in his life!
He walks along the street, thinking how stupid it is for him to be pissed off about being blamed for the glasses (...the ones your brother broke, then vanished so you'd get scapegoated for them? Yes, how dare you be upset that your brother used you as a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card!), thinking about how much he wishes that he had some excitement in his life, when he passes by the same-old same-old bookstore he's been by dozens of times...
And sees there's a sign on it!
Is it advertising a half-off sale? New shipments of a bestseller? No! Instead it says, mysteriously, enticingly:
ADVENTURERS WANTED!
He stares at it, wondering what it means, when it changes before his very eyes!
ADVENTURERS WANTED! INQUIRE WITHIN! And again: GREAT ADVENTURES! REASONABLE PRICES! APPLY TODAY!
He looks up and down the street and realizes that it's strangely empty! Why, this street is always hopping and bustling! And look at this strange sign! It's advertising ADVENTURES!
He decides, then, that he must go into this bookshop! And thus he does...
...To ask why the paper sign seems to be changing.
...
Folks, I don't know if this is supposed to be our Establishing Character Moment, but if it isn't, it's a doozy of an accident that it ended up that way.
Inside the shop, Alex ends up face-to-face with an impish little man named Mr. Clutter, who is shocked—shocked! to see Alex wandering into that shop. Not just anyone can see it, or the sign! Why, no one has for a thousand years! Alex's Shoulder-Narrator helpfully channels the exact nature of his emotions toward us like a written mood ring—he's confused, he has butterflies, he doesn't know what else to do, always straightforward and without any ambiguity. Regardless, Mr. Clutter is a fast-talking little sprite who coerces Alex into filling out a form to apply to be an adventurer.
Alex has reservations about this. He didn't come in to become an adventurer, his monologue constantly reminds us. But heedless Mr. Clutter keeps filling out that form. There's some questions on it that need to be filled out, like "What's your age?" (Fifteen; sixteen in two months.) "Do you have weapons proficiency?" And, of course, do you believe in maaaaagic?
Notable in that, for that question (and a Mysterious Question #7, which apparently "everyone says yes to"), Mr. Clutter doesn't even let Alex fill these in for himself. Oh sure, inwardly, Alex thinks, But magic doesn't exist!, but he doesn't voice it before Mr. Clutter charges blindly ahead. He just marks them as "yes." Alex still does not want to be an adventurer.
The only word about this he speaks to Mr. Clutter? "No, I—" Then it's gone. He never once outwardly protests again, despite his Shoulder Mood Ring Narrator constantly smacking us in the face with the wet rag of his emotions.
Mr. Clutter hands him a pen. Without so much as a second thought laid bare for us in the prose, he signs the contract, and is swept along a corridor of many rooms to a back room with windows that look out into an unearthly snow-covered field very much not a part of Earth. His reaction? Sit down in a chair, and be vaguely "dazed." This is the last we hear of those marvelous windows.
Unfortunately, it looks as if Alex is one of those protagonists.
In the posts in the original "Kid's Books" topic, in the Lit forum, where I first started talking about this book, I described Alex as an "Unquestioner" hero. Alex is the sort of Extreme Doormat protagonist who is surrounded by odd happenings, strange people, and impossiblilities of all colors, and reacts to them with a resounding... "Meh." Not even the disdainful sort of "meh" that might indicate a character with some opinions—he's indifferent in an aloof way. We are told and told and told that he has emotions—worry, excitement, fear—but they never make it past his tongue or his glassy eyes. He doesn't get curious about things a normal person would. He's allowed to ask questions, but only questions that allow the author to dispense the precise amount of infodump. And those, of course, are never (or rarely) the sorts of questions you might expect a real person to ask in that situation.
Heroes who aren't proactive can work—Pinball Protagonist, after all, isn't inherently a negative trope—but he isn't reactive, either. He is the noble gas of protagonists: Wholly inert, and with about as much substance.
But back to the plot. Mr. Clutter returns, followed by two people. ...Let me just copy and paste their description right here, because it says it all better than I can:
The first man was barely five feet tall, with wide shoulders and short legs. He wore large leather shoes and a blood-red shirt. His beard reached to just below his belt. The second person was close to six feet tall, with long, silver-blonde hair and a happy, almost glowing, face. His clothes seemed to be all different shades of green, but Alex couldn't tell what they were made of....Ayup. I'm not going to bother to explain their personalities. Take a good guess as to what they're like. Got your guess? Good! You're absolutely correct!
Mr. Clutter decides to leave Alex alone with Mr. and Mrs. Cookiecutter, and tells them that, although Alex is a first-time adventurer, he seems willing. *Cough cough*
Mrs. Cookiecutter, he of the mellifluous voice, decides to introduce himself first: Arconn of the house of Dalious, in the great forest lands of Delanor.
Correction! I am applying my liquid paper to the book as we speak! (Well, not really—I'll probably sell this book back to the second-hand book store I bought it from, so I want it to be pristine—but just roll with the metaphor here.) Arconn isn't bad—you can keep your name—but your family history needs a little work. You are now from the house of Playboy, because let's face it, you elves get all the chicks anyway. To say nothing of your chicks themselves. And since you elves need to migrate a little, I'm relocating you and the entire Playboy Mansion to the great deserts of the Sonora. Trust me, prickly pear will be a great addition to your all-vegetarian, all-organic diet.
Beltbeard introduces himself as... Oh, no. No no no. You have got to be kidding me.
He's Thrang Silversmith, son or Thorgood (omfg are you serious) of Thraxon (sound the thraxons! We've got a DWARF on the horizon!)
Let's face it: I'm not going to get any better than our page's take on it. You, "Thrang" ("THRANG WANT MEAT!") are now Dwarfbeard Dwarfson.
Jeez, Alex doesn't even get to introduce himself. Arconn does it for him. At least Dwarfbeard (...seriously, "Thrang?" "Thrang?") seems mildly sympathetic to Alex's "I seriously want to know WTF is going on here even if I'm too wimpy to just ask somebody" deer-eyes.
HOLY COW ALEX ACTUALLY ASKS A QUESTION: WTF was going on outside Mr. Clutter's shop, and... where... did... they... come...from.
...Dude, even if you don't believe in magic (as you have noted you don't, not really), you just came through a hallway stuffed with doors. There is no reason those two couldn't have been in a side room. NOT CURIOUS IN THE WAYS OF NORMAL PEOPLE.
Dwarfbeard then explains that none of them were really there, outside the shop, or in it now, or something. Except he doesn't actually explain it, since he says it's too complicated, so he tells Alex to just except it.
Dwarfbeard: "You too, you pesky readers!" *dwarfslapped*
Alex worries in front of them that he's been gone a long time. He really needs to get back to being punished for no reason by his stepfather! But amidst all this "Not really there" nonsense, Dwarfbeard drops the bomb: He's not been gone long at all! Oooo OOO Oooooh! Spooky! Helpful! Completely expected!
Arconn wants to tell him step-by-step what's going on, so Alex really understands it. Dwarfbeard berates Son of Playboy for treating Alex like a child—by daring to suggest Alex might actually want to understand something?—and just cuts to the quick.
I will admit, Dwarfbeard's explanation about how Narnia Time works in this universe is actually reasonably unique. Since it wouldn't do for adventurers to vanish for long periods of time, they always come back to their homelands when they left. But they also arrive in Distant Lands precisely when they're needed. Fair enough. The actually-kinda-neat bit is that if an adventurer goes on another adventure after going back home, they can pick their age on the adventure from any age they'd been when they were on it. So if a 15-year-old had a 10-year adventure, they could decide to start another adventure from the age of 20.
Arconn: "If you're willing to accept that magic's involved, it all makes much more sense." *Bishōnen smile*
Translation: "EAT PLOT, MOFO!" *Shove*
They then have a lunch composed of tea and cakes. The silver lamp in the room (which I guess was always there) suddenly turns itself into a dining table before his very eyes OMG!
Why, it must be... MAAAAGIC!
Over drinks and snack food, Arconn Playboy and Dwarfbeard seem a bit confused at first that Alex doesn't know about adventures or magic since he saw the sign (gasp!) but just admit... it must be fate! Oooooh! Again!
And, mercifully, that is the end of Chapter 1.
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