THE MAMBO WIZARD: BREAKFAST IS SERVED by Giordano J. Lahaderne

I received a complimentary copy of THE MAMBO WIZARD: BREAKFAST IS SERVED by Giordano J. Lahaderne from the author for the purpose of reviewing it for #SPFBO9 for the team created by @coverswithcassidy. The author also kindly sent me a finished copy!

THE MAMBO WIZARD follows an eclectic group Jeremy is a young human wizard who is good at magically creating breakfast foods, but not so good at other school pursuits, and therefore finds himself expelled from Pigpimples Academie of Magick. Moe and Zippo are space pirates from alien races, but they find themselves crash landed on earth right in Jeremy’s yard with trouble close behind.

I will admit that I didn’t know what I would be getting when a book about breakfast wizardry got put on my #SPFBO list, but I was happy to give it a read and find out. This book was really a lot of fun. The synopsis promises “swashbuckling adventure” and I think it really delivered what it promised.

The whole book is written as a ‘translated’ account of Zippo’s story. Chatterbot 2000 (ver. 3.6) starts the book with translator notes and pops up once in a while during the story to give a bit of additional information about things mentioned. This type of thing can be overdone and distract from the story, but I found that the author did well at keeping these brief and nonintrusive. They added a bit of extra humor as well.

The names in the book have a lot of humor to them. The headmage is named Chamberpot and one of the houses is Fluffernut. I think that gives you a quick idea from the start of the book of some of the silly fun that the author is including. The plot and the twists and turns faced by the characters follow suit. With the original memoir from Zippo supposedly published in 1978, there are a lot of things mentioned which give an older feel (particularly with the slang used) mixed with the scifi technology of space travel and alien races and magic.

I really enjoyed Jeremy as one of our main characters. He starts off strong saving the life of a hamster named Donut and I love the way he melded with Moe and Zippo. The trio are very different people (a human boy, an alien who resembles a short human eight year old, and a six foot hairless cat man complete with paws) but I loved the found family aspect that they created as misfits from the world.

There is a lot going on in this book between the wizardry school setting that Jeremy has been in, video games, music piracy with a black hole time twist, the breakfast food obsessions, and more, but it all worked together well. The book comes to a good conclusion as well, though there is certainly room for more adventure. Chatterbot 2000 (ver 3.6) promises there is more to come in THE MAMBO WIZARD: HOT SALSA!

This isn’t the type of fantasy and humor I necessarily gravitate toward, but I do think it did really well at accomplishing what it set out to do and what the synopsis promised! It was a fun ride and one worth checking out. Plus, I’m always in for a book that gives me a good excuse to splurge on bacon pastries! THE MAMBO WIZARD is available on Kindle Unlimited as well!