Writing epic fantasy and world building is tough. On the one hand you want to build a world that feels real, that your characters can inhabit, but you don't want the minutiae to overwhelm the story. Particularly if what you are aiming for is a sense of myth, of a broad complex plot heavy story where the price of wheat in the kingdom is less important than a capricious sorceress starving an entire kingdom. I started The Fifth Kingdom relatively agog at its stripped down world. There are four kingdoms, North, South, East and West. There was briefly a Fifth Kingdom, ruled by a green eyed witch Queen (wither Queendom) which was destroyed with her hubris in a grand romantic tragedy, but a prophecy says she will rise again. So some kings, queens, princes and princesses knock about over four sub novellas playing and replaying a grand tragedy. Its 50% narrative, 50% the two lead characters (the resurrections of the old myth) being pissed off by being trapped by the narrative. And it felt like such a throwback that I rather enjoyed it. Magic has no rules (as it shouldn't), the mechanics of building a Kingdom from scratch totally ignored. If you were a serf, if it wasn't for the annoying starving bit, you'd probably watch all of this nonsense with a jaundiced eye and get back to - well it is unclear what everyone does on a day to day basis in these kingdoms. But then the same can be said of Arthurian myth - they don't exactly bang on about quality of life for the average peasant beyond saying how much they loved their King. Beyond some lands being hotter or colder, and the protagonists being dark skinned, there isn't much detailed description here at all.

Sometimes all you need is a half decent narrative drive, and the rest will follow. In the authors afterword she says how long this story has been sitting on her, since she was a child, and there is a childish naivity to the overall story which flits between fairytale and myth. But that just means it is out of step with current fashion (and there is much here that a close reading might take apart).