Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Kill the Farm Boy is proof that a socially-aware story with highly representative characters, poking tongue-in-cheek fun at fantasy tropes, is not always... well, good. I wanted to like this book. Marketing referenced Princess Bride, Monty Python, Terry Pratchett. Heck, the stated aim was to make fun of white male power fantasies. (See the Acknowledgments.) Awesome! Sounds great! Right up my alley. But unlike the other works and authors mentioned above, the humor in Kill the Farm Boy was cringeworthy and sad. I’m a fan of clever puns, but this book indulged in only the most obvious, and then drove them into the ground through repetition. No joke could be made without another character echoing it, and then a third, and then the narration explaining the joke in case the reader did not get it. I’m also fine with anachronisms in comic fantasy. Terry Pratchett used these to great comic effect throughout the Discworld series. However, he did not tend to offer up thinly veiled pop culture references and assume that would be sufficient. The level of humor is much closer to Piers Anthony’s Xanth series — puerile and superfluous. Even with all of that, I might have remained kindly disposed to the book. It’s pretty much the only book of modern fantasy I’ve read whose central romantic couple was a lesbian relationship, which is never questioned as odd or wrong, and not sexualized for the sake of male readers. Socially conscious! Progressive! Awesome! But the dick jokes. And vagina jokes, and boob jokes, and poo and mucus and on and on and on. They undercut everything. At one point, I made a note of one particular line that summed up the whole thing for me. “It died with ululations and a torrent of diarrhea.” (Page 190 in my edition. In a paragraph by itself, you can’t miss it.) So that’s my review of the book. A strong premise was marred by bad jokes and biological humor, and as a result, the whole thing died with ululations and a torrent of diarrhea. I can only hope that at some point, someone can do this concept justice, because it deserves better than this book gave it.