Ogre, Ogre

Smash is half ogre, which in Xanth means enormous strength and a proud absence of brains. He goes to the Good Magician Humfrey with a question, and Humfrey charges what he always charges, a year of service. The assignment: escort a half-nymph named Tandy, and go and find the Ancestral Ogres.

The engine of the book is a vine Smash picks up along the way, which makes him intelligent. He experiences this as an illness. A thinking ogre is a defective ogre, so he starts noticing consequences, starts weighing things, and spends the journey trying to get the improvement out of his system. Around that runs the standard Xanth machine: a walking tour of a landscape built entirely out of puns, a party of young women in trouble that grows at every stop, and one groan-worthy piece of wordplay per page as a matter of policy.

This is the fifth Xanth novel and the series' habits are fully set by now. The puns are the point and they are relentless; three hundred pages of them is charming or unbearable and there is no third outcome. The harder problem is the women. Anthony writes them as things to be described, and a book whose premise is a year of escorting girls gives him more opportunity than most. The idea underneath, that being made cleverer can feel like being made worse at being yourself, is better than the book built around it.