Customer Reviews

Faun & Games

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

In my opinion this is not one of the better Xanth books. It sort of drags along but some interesting and good things happen. As for those who continue to complain that there are too many puns all I can say is "then quit reading them unless you like to be unhappy"!!!

Another trip to Xanth, a new trip to Ptero. The Xanth books always had a fairy tale quality to them. Yes they get predictable, but so does every fairy tale. the good guy wins, the bad guy loses, we have fun along the way, and all's well.

The puns are numerous but do they really detract from the story? Not really, if you can't handle this, then you probably should read any of the Xanth books period. The pun strips are overflowing with puns, but guess what? That was the idea

To the story, we find a decent faun made good by his association with his tree, helped by a nightmare gone soft. Later, he's accompanied by two lovely princesses out for a good time but in the middle of a crisis so the good times will have to wait.
This journey takes them into a series of moons upon moons. The journey was not so much tedious, but the shift of planes gets disjointed. I suppose some people can't handle that. If you require your stories to stay effectively in a single plane of existence then be warned this book travels around.
That having been said is the story predictable. If that above is what you've expect when you pick up a book then I guess yes it is, I didn't. I suppose in a xanthy kind of way however, you can guess certain things. There will be an appropriately goofy manner of resolving the problem and a somewhat goofy problem
... The first 8 books are so detailed a xanth somewhat in strife. The magician trent had just taken over for the storm king, and the dark age of xanth had just ended, soon to enter a new golden era. The earlier books had more realistic problems and quests (search for the source of magic, considering the place is Xanth its not that unrealistic of a quest).
Truly in many ways the earlier novels, not the later ones, were the typical and predictable tales. They took a new world with plenty of potential but used more common fantasy themes, example, the lone warrior fighting dragons and other terrors of the fantasy wild.
Later novels, this time had ended, the tales involve more personal quests of individual characters. The stories became less about missions and more about the journeys, and the quests became by-products of a journey of greater character growth, the quest became a backdrop.
Similarly the character views changed scope. Older novels tended to be scoped from the overview perspective. Newer novels I find to be more based on a single character. The other characters will be crafted and molded around this character. Thus to those people out there who expect the story to tell all, then yes the character in the newer Xanth novels will seem shallow and uneventful. Their true depth becomes evident when you understand how they change through the eyes of the main character of the novel
I think if you view Xanth as you would other fantasy books, you'll think the characters are shallow, as you will be seeing the characters as simply the participants of the quests. But I think Xanth should be approached more from the aspect of the character being the story, and the quest is the backdrop.
This book is somewhat of a fine example of this. Ultimately (sorry to ruin the story) but the quest was meaningless. Forrest Faun's journey did nothing to solve his initial problem. But the journey that his quest took him on caused him to change, and this caused him to find what he was looking for and then some.
If you look to the quest to be the tale, then yes, Faun and Games is a disappointing book, and the ending would be rather empty. The quest leads nowhere
If you look to the faun to be the story, then you see the growth and the depth of characters that was there in all of Piers Anthony's books.

Faun and Games by Piers Anthony is about an almost unbelievably decent faun named Forrest. Although, he cannot resist his faunish nature, he endures with two or three lovely creatures on a quest to save a friend's tree. They discover several different worlds to find that one special faun. At last, Forrest finds the spirit to fill in the tree and, also, gets more than he's asked for.

This book was not the best of Piers Anthony's books. I found the book to be not as alluring as all of his books before, since it just brought some points that seemed rather predictable and unrealistic for me to believe. In the World of Xanth, things can get pretty unbelievable, but in this case, it was ridiculus and needs a change of personality of some characters to make things more interesting than sexually alluring.

I find that Faun & Games would be a fair novel because of the introductions of new and interesting worlds that I find appealing and of the introductions for future expectations of new characters that drew my attention for further novels.

I just got finished reading this book and I honestly must say, I couldn't keep my nose out of it.It was the best book I ever read and I mean that. The plot behind the book will keep you going so you never wanna put the book down! I must say the ending of the book was also the best ending that I have seen in a long time.I recomend this book for the ages of 15 and Older, Only reason I say 15 is because the book does talk a little about the sexual nature,if you will.I would say to buy this book and keep it close to your heart and I did.Enjoy!

I've just finished reading Faun & Games and have over the years read every Xanth novel before it. I gotta say, here was a setting with a fair amount of potential. Exploring Ptero had so much possibility. A world of might-bes. Unfortunately, the author seems to have just exploited it as a means to including as many of his readers Xanthine suggestions as he could, designing a loose plot around this catalogue. Please try harder Piers I know you can do better.

Faun & Games has easily become one of my favorite Xanth books ever! It has one of the best stories ever conjured for Xanth; taking you from planet to planet...literally!

Faun & Games is about a faun who's friend falls over a cliff while playing with a nymph...he sets off to find the tree a companion and is soon lauched into worlds/planets surrounding a woman's head! Sounds great and it is great! Enjoy!

Though the book is still fun to read, it was pretty much like the rest of the series: main character has a problem, goes to good magician, then ends up in a full fledged adventure. The trips to ida's moon is enough to make anyone loose track of where the characters were, where they came from, and what they were trying to accomplish.

I began reading Anthony when I was thirteen, and I thought thatit was just great. Over the next couple of years, I read every bookin his two Xanth series, and I had to wait for over a year before Icould read Faun and Games. I was sixteen by that time, and when I began to read it, I felt sick. I am so tired of all of his female characters being either beautiful and stupid, or ugly and a genius. And the male characters, even those that are truly unintelligent, always manage to be more clever than the women. This series did once have a fun, escapist quality to them, which made them funny, and a nice way to avoid real life for a few hours. But his novels have steadily gone downhill, and have now fallen so far in terms of quality that I can't even justify reading them anymore... The story line is overrun with useless puns, which are now completely unbearable, and the sudden appearance of these moons is a desperate attempt to keep [the] readers' attention in a series that has steadily lost it's originality. He ruined Mare Imbri, who was always one of my favorites by taking her out of her horse form, and giving her such lines as "I am femalishly curious." When I read that I almost threw the book down then and there. This author has created a low-brow man's paradise, with all of the female characters being nothing more than idiotic nymphs that always end up with their clothes off. ...It was simply a poorly written book with pathetic dialogue, a sad excuse for a storyline, and with one-dimensional characters that you could never find yourself caring about.

This book was wonderful! Brillant! Amazing! A beautiful book for all ages to read. I highly recommend this book, and all other Peirs Anthony Novels. My parents love them, my uncle loves them, my friends love them, and I love them too. They are a wonderful part of non-reality. Read if you dare.

I enjoyed the premise of the book, as I almost always do with Piers Anthony's Xanth books. But there are just getting to be too many puns. The obvious plot devices (like the comic strip) that serve as simply a way to work in all of the puns that the fans send in, is just too much.