Bear with me a second when I say that the first installment in Terry Brooks’s Landover series bears some resemblance to Elizabeth’s Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. No, really. In both books, the narrator has to come to terms with a painful separation from a loved one and feels the need to leave their established life behind to find inner peace. Elizabeth Gilbert survives her divorce and subsequent love affair by eating pasta in Italy, meditating in India and then falling in love in Bali. Ben Holiday comes to terms with the death of his wife by buying a magic kingdom and establishing himself as its rightful king. Obviously things diverge at this point and to give you a clue, it’s not Eat, Pray, Love that becomes shit.

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