8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Man from Mundania, January 10, 2000
Like any of Piers Anthony's Xanth books, this book is wonderful. If you haven't read a Xanth book before then you should start. This book was about Princess Ivy on a Quest. Her quest was to find the Good Magician Humfrey. She ends up in Mundania and meets Grey, an ordinary guy who needs her. He takes her back home and along the way they become engaged. Ivy's parents, the king and queen of Xanth, don't want their daughter to marry someone without a magic talent. This lends them to go off looking for a magic talent for Grey. There are so many scenes that are hilarious, like the scene where Grey and Ivy are captured by the goblins and they have to do some brave yet funny things(funny to me anyway). The twists in this story are great! (I think that the reading level of this book is around 5th or 6th grade level-I'm not good at judging this kind of thing) This is a great book and I think that anybody could read this book and love it!
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A highlight of Xanth, October 26, 2001
This review is from: Man from Mundania (Xanth, No. 12) (Mass Market Paperback)
"Man from Mundania" is number 12 in Piers Anthony's ever-growing Xanth series, which makes it the third volume of what I think of as the 'next generation' of Xanth novels (the first um, 'trilogy' ended with number 9, "Golem in the Gears"). In a way, it also marks one of the last of the old style Xanth books: although the series continues to be entertaining and amusing, I am less often enraptured by the characters of recent times. Perhaps I'm just getting old. Regardless, "Man from Mundania" remains one of my favourite Xanth novels that I have returned to many times to read and savour.
Our heroine for this episode is Princess Ivy, now eighteen and of marriageable age. Being a Sorceress, she must marry a man of similar calibre magic, which presents a slightly awkward situation, since no suitable candidates currently exist in Xanth. Ivy isn't too worried, though- she's in no hurry to get married. Instead, she decides to set off on a Quest: to find the missing Good Magician Humfrey, who has mysteriously disappeared (since volume 10, "Vale of the Vole"). Her quest sends her to that most terrible of blah and boring places, Mundania. Here she meets Grey Murphy, a seemingly ordinary mundane Mundane with hair-coloured hair, eye-coloured eyes and no apparent distinguishing features at all. Grey teaches Ivy about Mundania, while she attempts to convince him about the existence of Xanth, finally taking him back home with her. Along the way, of course (this being a Xanth novel, after all!) they fall in love. And this presents yet another problem, since Ivy must marry a Magician, and Grey is a Mundane who has no magic talent at all- or does he?
Ivy and Grey's adventures in the lands of Mundania and Xanth are inventive and entertaining, filled with the sunny good humour of the Xanth series. Characters with a satisfying amount of depth and a well-constructed plot add to the mix to make this one of the best novels in the Xanth series.
8.5 stars out of 10
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Xanth's last hurrah, April 15, 2003
This review is from: Man from Mundania (Xanth, No. 12) (Mass Market Paperback)
I have to hand one thing to Piers Anthony: He managed to take a single plot element, the disappearance of Good Magician Humphrey, and make it last for five novels, barely advancing the search for the Good Magician in each book.
After her brother Dolph looked for the Good Magician Humphrey in the previous book and came back with two fiancees, Princess Ivy decides its her turn to go look for the Answer-providing Magician. After stealing back a magical mirror from a magical Com-Pewter, she invokes the Heaven Cent and ....
Enter Grey Murphy, stage left. Residing in magicless Mundania, he has managed to obtain a computer program that procures girlfriends for him. And its latest procurement? No prize if you guess Ivy. Following the by-now standard Xanth formula, they undertake a journey (back to Xanth) and fall in love along the way.
But it's a good journey. Piers Anthony made two very, very good decisions with this novel. First, he abandoned the juvenile tone that infested earlier and later entries in the Xanth series. Second, after umpty-ump Xanth novels made tangle trees, ladies-slipper bushes, and other magical marvels seem mundane, Anthony chose to approach much of novel through an outsider -- Grey Murphy.
Even as he confronts wonder after wonder, Grey Murphy refuses to believe in magic. A sailing mountain? Special effects. Invisible giant spouting a river of blood? Food coloring. A half-human, half-equine centaur? A robot. A hate spring? Ordinary water, backed by a strong superstition that it will make people hate each other.
Despite his disbelief in magic, Grey Murphy is nonetheless the typical Anthony protagonist, with a code of ethics that uniformly matches every other protagonist we've seen out there. Not that I mind ethical characters, mind you; it just gets tiresome when, after a dozen books, all the good guys display identical codes of ethics. Kind of ruins diversity of characters.
The plot continues, with Grey having to meet a certain challenge to successfully assert a claim to Ivy's hand in marriage, journey all over Mount Parnassus, and overcome a rather nasty oath that's been forced on him ... but things might just turn out well for this happy couple, right? Right??
If you would like to inflict the remainder of this series on yourself, this book is a very good jumping-on point. Grey Murphy's unfamiliarity with the land of magic makes him a good proxy for an unfamiliar reader, but the book's other flaws (uniform characters, linear plotting) keep it from a perfect rating.
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