Book Review: The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson

The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson

A man wakes up in a field surrounded by scorch marks wondering where he is. More distressing, he wonders who he is. He quickly discovers he's in Medieval England though a bunch of details are off. Days of the week have different names, writing is forbidden, and magic is real. He finds a lot of loose papers around him. The titular handbook is something he brought to help him but it exploded when he arrived. He's cobbled together a bunch of pages but key texts are missing, like the page where he wrote down his name and purpose for being there. The book is additionally unhelpful in that it's mostly advertising, though it does explain that he is in an alternate dimension that is very similar to his home dimension. He quickly discovers there are other people from (probably) his dimension that are looking for him and making trouble for the locals. He imagines himself a hero, so he sets off on a hero's quest. As his memories come back, he starts to doubt himself and what's going on.

Sanderson wrote this as one of his lockdown projects. He'd had the idea for the title and also the idea to write a "guy wakes up in an unfamiliar environment with amnesia" stories. Once the two ideas met, this novel was born. The book has the light-hearted whimsy Sanderson is so good at in the Alcatraz stories. I found the amnesia element a bit underwhelming. He always got key memories back just when it helped the plot along, which to me reads as forced rather than natural development. The illustrations are fun and the excerpts from the Handbook are entertaining. I enjoyed reading this once but probably won't re-read it.

Mildly recommended.