w.t.f.

Truly weird - even for Macleod's Shandy series. The main characters fall randomly into a magical, cursed world in a dream like way with no real explanation and back out again afterwards.... Very very strange. ( )

The Curse of the Giant Hogweed is my favorite Peter Shandy book. I love the late Ms. MacLeod's send-up of fairy tales and old-fashioned fantasies! Professors Shandy, Ames, and Stott are in England, near the border of Wales, to help deal with an overgrowth of the giant hogweed. Leaving Helen Shandy and Iduna Stott to enjoy themselves in Merry Olde, the guys cross over into Wales. They enter an empty pub that's really old.

At this point what happens may just be Peter's dream, not unlike Alice's dream about Wonderland. If you want to, you may consider it a genuine adventure in some alternate dimension. Shandy finds himself in a never-logged forest. He's wearing nothing but what he considers a bedsheet and buskins. First he meets a woeful young giant of a hero named Torchyld who has been falsely accused of causing his great-uncle King Sfyn's cherished pet griffin to vanish. They run into Ames and Stott. Well before this adventure is over our esteemed professors are known as Archdruid Timothy Ames, Assistant Archdruid Daniel Stott, and Boss Bard Peter Shandy.

Another hint that this is all just a dream is that the giant hogweed is present in this past even though it was apparently introduced to Britain in the 19th century. The nasty anachronism proceeds to herd our heroes into a harrowing adventure inside a cave. If this is Shandy's dream, perhaps his subconscious remembers information that Stott provides, such as the identity of Cerridwen and what happens in fairytale and fantasy books Stott's sister, Matilda, provided for his eight offspring when they were little. Does Ames really have an Aunt Winona to whose old sitz bath he compares the coracle that shows up when they need it?

They do indeed introduce much-needed soap to the inhabitants of Lord Ysgard's castle, once Shandy and Ames' experiments to recreate Hilda Horsefall's old recipe succeed. There's treachery, evil, love, and murder in store, not to mention plenty of laughs and chuckles on the way, before good triumphs and evil is punished. Can Shandy teach Torchyld not to be so ready to believe in enchantments that are nothing of the sort? Will the giant horseweed be similarly vanquished?

Notes: I just checked to see if the giant hogweed is real, and it is. This novel doesn't mention one of the problems with the pest: its sap can cause temporary or permanent blindness. If you live in the USA, you might want to check a map to see if your state has been infested. So far mine hasn't, thank God.

Also just looked up "ye" which is both a singular and plural "you" and an archiac spelling of "the". Hadn't known that was correct.

The uncredited paperback cover with a rabbit trying to escape a skull made of giant hogweed at least makes imaginative use of the skull motif for a murder mystery. It also combines realism with fantasy, which fits this novel.

I particularly recommend The Curse of the Giant Hogweed to mystery & fantasy fans who enjoy parodies. ( )

This book left me shaking my head. It is, at best, a weak mystery, combined with a weak fantasy, where Peter Shandy, Dan Stott and Timothy Ames wander through a bizarre medieval-esque Wales unprecedented in history or literature, with frequent references to the plot-driven properties of fantasies like Oz or Alice in Wonderland. Inhabitants of this world speak a language that uses ye as both "the" and "you", splattered with Scottishisms and the occasional Welsh word tossed in where it will be unambiguous, which MacLeod makes us work through throughout the book; no one seems to notice the fact that Shandy and friends are speaking modern English. Shandy and friends are of course competent at everything, offering marriage services, bardic skills and new inventions to an always accepting audience. The nadir of this is where Professor Shandy teaches someone who has a sword about bows, which showed up in Europe before 3,300 BC.

MacLeod is a good author, and manages to make a story out of all this. If you're looking for a volume where modern people fall into an ill-defined fantasy world and blunder their way around, well there's a lot better than this, but there's also a lot worse. ( )