Sweet Myth-tery of Life [Paperback]

Robert Asprin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1995

When the queen makes him an offer he cannot refuse, master-magician Skeeve must use his powers to devise an escape before wedding bells start to chime, in the latest volume in the popular Myth series. Reprint.

Product Details

• Paperback: 226 pages
• Publisher: Ace; Reprint edition (May 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441001947
• ISBN-13: 978-0441001941
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,141,486 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A rather remarkable accomplishment, August 24, 1998

By 

Charles ([e-mail]) (Minneapolis, Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sweet Myth-tery of Life (Paperback)

Readers of the Myth books will no doubt notice that most recent few have a tendency to stop the narrative at a moment's notice and enter into drawn out, irritating tangential asides. This book, in light of that trend, is something of a remarkable achievement: it is the first book in the series composed entirely of such tangential asides.

The plot has been well documented through the other reviews on this board, so I won't rehash it here. One thing worth noting, however, is that despite the fact that the plot concerns Skeeve's decision whether to marry Queen Hemlock, the book concerns itself little with that particular line. Queen Hemlock does not play a significant role in this book, appearing in no more than two scenes.

Instead, Robert Asprin has saw it fit to fill his latest Myth book with his thoughts on why relationships break down or become abusive, how salary structures in a corporation are created, and most ridiculously, that a fashion model's life is not all glamorous, among others. Somewhere along the line, Robert Asprin completely lost the notion of a coherent narrative. I feel comfortable in identifying the thought's as Asprin's, because none of the characters have been defined enough for me to recognize the sentiments expressed as their own rather than Asprin's.

And perhaps what's worse, is that Asprin continues to suggest storylines within the book that interest me, but he quickly ignores them in favor of another tangential aside. The book is a remarkable disappointment.

As such, I cannot recommend it. It heartily deserves its one star rating.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Jumping the shark, July 19, 2001

By 

T. Shane Clark (Salt Lake City, UT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sweet Myth-tery of Life (Paperback)

Robert Asprin had a great thing going with the Myth series -- it was funny and inspired for a long time. But, I guess all good things must come to an end.

Pretty much everything after the very good 'Little Myth Marker' has been a disappointment to me. That seems to be the point when the books became less about the story and more about the author seemingly using his characters to pontificate about the stock market, relationships, celebrity, and the meaning of friendship. I really got the feeling sometimes that he was using Skeeve and the other characters to work out his own personal issues -- the problem was that it was pretty transparent that this is what he was doing.

The earlier books were more about "adventures" -- what Skeeve, Aahz, Tanda, and company were doing. When this series started to be about "feelings," I just found it harder to keep my interest up. A comic/farcical series like this is just not the forum for rambling on about life, the universe, and everything. Also, when other characters started to serve as the narrator, it just became very annoying and silly for me. The longer the books went on, the more glaring the inconsistencies became.

My investment in the series kept me reading and will likely sustain me if Asprin ever decides to actually release the next book and resolve the cliffhanger that he so rudely left his readers with (if the guy wasn't ready to write the next book in some reasonable time period, then why the heck do the suspense ending with your audience).

This series is wonderful and entertaining -- to a point. The cautionary tale is, I suppose, that authors should not sign deals to write a big handful of other books unless they are sure they can maintain interest, focus, and quality.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars myth-representation, December 19, 2000

By 

Kevin D. Flythe (Greenville, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sweet Myth-tery of Life (Paperback)

Let me start off my review by saying that this is the first and only book in the MYTH series that I've read, as well as the first and only book by Robert Asprin that I've read. The MYTH series was always highly recommended to me, but my local bookseller didn't have any of them, so I waited for the next installment so that I could sample it and see if the rest of the books were worth tracking down.

Well, from reading the reviews on this page, it seems I jumped in on a bad installment, when the series was losing its luster and the author was losing interest. That is not to say that what I read was not at all good. In fact, I thought it was very funny and very well written. However, as a complete novel... well, it just isn't. It seems that the whole purpose of having Skeeve debate whom to love or not to love came up as the result of a situation that had something to do with marrying Queen Hemlock, which I assume was a major plot point begun in the previous installment. Well, the situation was never resolved, so this book accomplishes nothing at all in terms of advancing the series.

The only advancement to speak of comes at the end when something happens to Skeeve's dragon, Gleep, who seems to be able to talk now. There were hints all along that there was something up with the dragon, but the ending still came very suddenly. The good thing is, it left me wanting more. The bad thing is that, so far, there is no more. The new book, if there ever will be one, isn't out yet.

It seems like this series is a lot of fun. A shame that my first impression of it had to be a poorly-crafted installment of it. If you're a follower/fan of the series, you'll probably love the book and should read it (I had fun with it even though I had no idea what was going on). Still, in and of itself, there's not much to it.