Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

Book Overview

'Frantically wacky and wilfully confusing ... gratifyingly clever and very amusing' - Mail on Sunday

'Frothy, fast and funny' - Scotland on Sunday

J.W. Wells seemed to be a respectable establishment, but the company now paying Paul Carpenter's salary is in fact a deeply sinister organisation with a mighty peculiar management team.

Paul thought he was getting the hang of it (particularly when he fell...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B002YX0GMS
• ISBN13: 9781841492827
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Orbit UK
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

great book

What a great book in the three book series. The whole set it just fantastic--interesting, creative, engaging, unusual, and just wonderful.

Good, but not as great as Portable Door or In Your Dreams.

3 stars for people just looking for a book to read. 4 stars for those who've read the other two books and are looking for a conclusion. I'm sure most of you reading this know already, but this is the third (and probably final) book in the adventures of Paul Carpenter. The first was Portable Door, an excellent and witty book, and the second was In Your Dreams, which was almost as good. Portable Door was terribly funny in that you could relate to so much of what Paul was going through. In Your Dreams kind of got bogged down in the fairy? story. It was more serious, not like the lighthearted romp of Portable Door. EAF & C isn't really that funny at all. It does have moments of witty dialogue, but not the laugh-out-loud, repeat-the-lines-to-everyone-you-know sort of dialogue. Much of it even got confusing, and the explanations for the weird happenings didn't make sense. Whereas, In Your Dreams tied all the loose ends up and explained everything (you could just see how all the events tied together and made sense), EAF & C just lost me. They start all this talk about people hiding out in custard-space, and how Sophie and this goblin were linked through it, then there was this bit about living swords, battles that didn't get fought, etc. It was just all smushed together, and didn't really form a cohesive, fun-to-read story. I mean, I still love to read about Paul and his misadventures, but I really had to make an effort to get through this one. If you've read the previous two, you'll know what I say when I just wanted to get through it to see how Sophie and Paul ended up (which is resolved, by the way). Overall, read it if you liked the other two in the series, but if you haven't read those, start out with Portable Door and In Your Dreams. By the end of those, you will want to find out what happens to Paul and the gang, but reading EAF & C alone won't really be a completely fun experience. I guess it seems that Tom Holt was just trying to finish up with Paul so that readers would be happy. Most of his books are much better than this one.