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.

Great Wolf Lodge, Minneapolis, MN

On our Christmas visit to Minnesota, we spent a night at the local Great Wolf Lodge. The place is a hotel with a water theme park (indoors), a MagiQuest adventure game, food, and other amenities. The wolf outside was appropriately snowy, considering the sub-zero temperatures.

Do not ask for whom the great wolf howls...

The water park was a blast though we did not get any pictures of us playing. They have six slides, including one massive one that is seven or eight stories tall. The lazy river was relaxing. The wave pool was a little more stimulating and the surf section had too long of a line for me to try it out. The youngest in our group enjoyed the kids play area.

View of the water park from the "Hungry as a Wolf" restaurant

View of the water park from our hotel room

Our hotel room faced the Minnesota skyline, which was far away. Still, it was exciting for our geograph-phile child.

Skyline at day

Skyline at night

We brought our wands from our Williamsburg Great Wolf Lodge adventure and shared one with our cousins. My kids did a lot of running around, interacting with various decorations and screens on the first two floors of the lodge.

Working together

Getting an assignment

Getting an ice arrow

Getting the drop on a dragon

The dragon dropped

The lodge has other activities like a climbing wall, a high ropes course, and a stage with various performances (including a knighting ceremony for anyone who finished the MagiQuest). We did none of those. Maybe if we had stayed longer we'd have done even more. The water park is the star attraction.

Some other kid on the rock wall

High ropes adventure

Maybe we will visit another Great Wolf Lodge in the new year!

Book Review: The Prestige by Christopher Priest

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

Two magicians get drawn into a dangerous, hurtful rivalry in late 1800s and early 1900s Britain. Alfred Borden is an old-school illusionist who is very philosophical and technical about his craft. As an illusionist, he keeps lots of secrets, especially about his tricks, the most amazing of which is THE NEW TRANSPORTED MAN. In this trick, he steps into a cabinet on one side of the stage and instantly comes out of another cabinet on the other side of the stage. He might toss a hat or bounce a ball to himself to make it more theatrical. Rupert Angier is the second son of a Lord and has dreamed his whole life of being a magician. He has the theatricality naturally and the technique through practice. He also keeps lots of secrets, especially about his family life. He foreswears his nobility and lives in poverty, scraping by on odd jobs. He develops a spiritualist act (very trendy in late 1800s England) as a side hustle with a woman he marries. Borden hears about this and seeks to debunk Angier. When he finally confronts Angier, an accident causes Angier's wife to miscarry (though Borden does not know she is pregnant). Angier starts to take revenge by exposing Borden's illusions during performances, and Borden does the same for Angier. Their lives intertwine through the decades as their competition escalates to tragic ends.

The story has a framing device with two descendants of the Borden and Angier families trying to reconcile the feud in the early 1990s. The main narrative is told through the diaries of Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. The reader has to grapple with the different perspectives on events and with the magicians' deliberate obfuscations in their writing. Having seen the movie version, I knew the key secrets which made it easier to comprehend passages that were obviously meant to be intriguingly vague, to force the reader to pay attention to details. The mystery is still interesting because both magicians are flawed but engaging characters. The book clearly sympathizes more with Angier, though both are sympathetic if one looks only at their individual diary (I found the characters in the movie to be universally unsympathetic). Both characters (and thereby I assume the author) realize the professional conflict is a waste and they would have been better off working together. The rivalry drives them to use horrible means and ends that cause problems for both families down to the present day.

The book is very interesting in several ways. If the reader hasn't experienced the story before, immediate re-reading is tempting to fill in narrative holes left in the various diaries. Usually I do not like dramas where information is left out deliberately to enhance the drama but using the ego-written diaries is a plausible way to present partial (and misleading) information. Thematically, there's a lot of duality. As the two magicians proceed in their careers, they have similar experiences, especially with women. They try to outdo each other with the same magic tricks and try the same tactics to expose each other or to find out secrets. Even though they are rivals, they are not so different from each other. The "authors" discuss a lot of the theatrical technique that goes into a good stage performance which gives the reader interesting information. Angier's ultimate method of improving THE NEW TRANSPORTED MAN leaves a lot of moral and philosophical questions for the reader to mull over. The book is a rich source for re-reading and reflection.

Highly recommended.

This book is discussed on A Good Story is Hard to Find Podcast #289. I am glad that they inspired me to read the book because I was not a big fan of the movie.

Great Wolf Lodge, Williamsburg, Virginia

In celebration of President's Day Weekend, we drove straight past Mount Vernon (home of George Washington) and drove down to Williamsburg, Virginia, to one of the many Great Wolf Lodges across the USA. The place is a big playground for young teens and younger (and young at heart).

Entrance to Great Wolf Lodge

 When we checked in, the lady behind the desk handed out wolf ears to our kids. Two out of three children were happy to wear them.

A happy four-eared child

Twice the fun

They even posed in a fun wooden chair!

Best you can get with three kids in one picture where they have to sit on each other's laps

We checked in and went to our room, which was spacious, with a kids' area featuring bunk beds and a more traditional area for us parents.

Parents' end of the room

A fireplace and a TV!

Kid's area

Inside the kid's area

Our particular room looked over the back of the property--a view to the water park!

Out our window

In the lobby is a giant clock that has an animatronic performance. We didn't stick around too long because we wanted to get to the water park.

The great clock show

I forgot to bring the GoPro camera (which is nicely waterproof) so I only took pictures from outside the water park area.

Pools and water exploring area

Water exploring, wave pool, toddler pool

The water park was a lot of fun. In addition to the short slides in the water exploration area, the back of the building had much larger slides for the 8-year-old and up crowd. Our kindergartner was not interested in climbing lots of stairs to go down the amazing (and somewhat terrifying) water slides. Those slides required inner tubes. One slide had a custom tube that could fit five people. The older kids enjoyed it a lot, especially dragging mommy on to experience the delightful terrors of going down a dark tunnel on a vinyl tube! We eventually got the youngest to go on the family slide though it took lots of reassurances.

The other big attraction at Great Wolf Lodge is MagiQuest. Parents buy their kids wands at a magic shop that lets them interact with various areas on three floors of the hotel. A handy map is provided.

Map of the fantasy land, with locations in the hotel identified below

The magic shop also gave us paper maps to carry around with us. The first stop for any magi was a magic portal, where missions are given. We started with the Pixie and Princess mission. On the monitor, it showed the runes we needed to collect in order to complete the mission.

Where to start

Each rune has its own set of items to collect. The items are in the halls of the hotel (though just near the lobby, not through the entire hotel). Pointing the wand at an item makes it light up. A hidden speak usually announces what reward is collected for pointing at the item. If it's part of the current quest, the item itself is collected. If it's not part of the quest, sometimes the player just gets some gold. Or the announcement says you don't need it yet.

Hawk's claw

Zapping a frog

Once all the elements are gathered, we went to a portal to combine them or given them to an on-screen character. The typical result was a rune useful for continuing the quest or in other  later quests.

The princess wants to get her jewels back from...

The goblin king, who we defeated

The game is fun but we did a lot of backtracking to get items. To do all the missions takes six to eight hours. The guy at the magic shop said that people can bring the wand back on a subsequent visits to pick up where they left off. I'm not sure we will remember to bring it again if we do go again.

Non-wand action

The place is amazing. It also has a bowling alley, an arcade (like Chuck E. Cheese), a 4D movie, and a few other things we didn't try. A mini-golf course and a high-ropes course located outside were not open in February. They also had activities like yoga, crafts, bingo, and story hour at various times. The kids did yoga once. We didn't try the other stuff.

We had a good time though the older kids are on the cusp of outgrowing some of the stuff.

Colin the Magnificient!

We went to visit our friend Colin and his parents during our trip to America. We did some usual things, like going to the playground, having a snack, playing with toys. But Colin did some amazing things for a four-and-a-half year old that I thought I'd share.

First, he's taken some lessons on the ukelele. While he hasn't stuck to practicing every day, he has been inventing his own songs. Some are just a couple of chords, like his "String 10, String 7, String 5, String 3." At least I think that was the name. Pedants might correct it to "Fret 10, etc." but these are the same people who complain about Alanis Morrisette's Ironic for not actually citing anything truly ironic. I like to think Morrisette is making a subtle comment about how inept pop music is at communicating anything profound. But I digress...another song by Colin is "Rocket in the Sky," which starts with a hummy bit interspersed with some strums. Then the lyrics"Rocket in the sky/Rocket in the sky/.../Rocket in the sky." The song was great and made us all applaud sincerely and not ironically.

Later on, J and Colin went up to Colin's room to hang out. About ten minutes on, we heard them calling us upstairs to see a magic show. Colin was the magician and J was the second magician, much like Penn and Teller. Their stage was the mostly empty space under Colin's bunk bed. J described the first trick, "You think this blanket is just a blanket with nothing in it...but behold!" He flipped the rolled up blanket in the air and out fell a stuffed sea-horse doll. We oohed and aahed. J repeated the trick with a second blanket, producing a small toy. Colin was lead magician for the next trick. He pulled out a foam sword and said, "Look at my foam sword, it seems like an ordinary foam sword, but look at this!" He then drew the sword across his throat. Nothing happened. "You would think FLAMES would have burst forth, but they didn't!" Colin exclaimed. We laughed and clapped again.

The next few tricks all involved making objects disappear. First, Colin had a balloon. He showed it to us and then asked us to count to ten with our eyes shut. When we opened our eyes again, the balloon disappeared! It was later discovered in the box under his bunk bed. Then the two magicians would make themselves disappear for the next trick! Again, we audience members had to close our eyes and count to ten. After opening our eyes, they were gone! L soon discovered them in the box under Colin's bed (it was a pretty big box). The tricks went on in that vein till dinner was ready.

The magic and the music of Colin's home made such a wonderful visit. It was nice to talk to his parents too, though not so blog-worthy.

Alas, only at the playground were pictures taken:

Colin and J racing

L in the swing of things