The Magician of Tiger Castle
Author: Sachar, Louis
Tags: fantasy
Timeline: between Thursday, October 30, 2025 and Sunday, November 2, 2025
I read this on the basis of my love of the book ‘Holes’. The book had a nice cover that looked unlike a cookie cutter of other recently published books (Is this a legit criterion? I don’t know but it feels like it should be.) It started out strong, as a story of the princess Tullia marrying the pauper, Pito, in spite of her parent’s wishes to have her marry another, awful, prince, with the help of a bumbling but wise magician. The setting is a European-ish country “Esquaveta” in an alternative earth timeline (sorta like Princess Bride) and somehow, Anatole the wizard, seems to understand entirely too much about the history of technology, but whatever, he’s magic. Anyway the princess and the pauper escape in some clever way that leaves Tullia and Pito as royalty and they all live happily ever after.", that’s the probably the plot this book was meant to have.
But then, about two-thirds through the book after the arranged marriage is foiled, the book loses its way (stop reading right here: I'm spoiling now). The happy couple are fleeing their homeland to the "neder lands" when Anatole is recaptured and returned to Esquaveta where he is made immortal in order to be put in the dungeon for a hundred years and we never find out what happens to princess Tullia and Pito. There are are a bunch of interesting plot mechanisms around potions, and of course a Tiger, but we never learn too much more about these things because Mr. Sachar just sabotaged his book. My mind wants very hard to explain why an accomplished writer would do this to an elegantly constructed story and how it got published; probably the explanation involves money and publishers. o well. And yet I see lots of verbiage telling everyone how great this book is -- they are all in on the scam.