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Earth, Air, Fire and Custard
 
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Earth, Air, Fire and Custard (Paperback)

by Tom Holt (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
RRP: £7.99
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Frequently Bought Together

Earth, Air, Fire and Custard + In Your Dreams + You Don't Have to be Evil to Work Here, But it Helps
Price For All Three: £17.97

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Product details

  • Paperback: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Orbit; New edition edition (19 Jan 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1841492825
  • ISBN-13: 978-1841492827
  • Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12 x 2.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 20,451 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #4 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > H > Holt, Tom

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Product Description

Review
Praise for IN YOUR DREAMS: 'Wacky humour bubbles through the polished narrative ... Holt doesn't skimp on the flashes of brilliance' SFX Praise for Tom Holt: 'Uniquely twisted ... cracking gags' Rob Grant, THE GUARDIAN, 'Frantically wacky and wilfully confusing ... gratifyingly clever and very amusing' MAIL ON SUNDAY, 'Frothy, fast and funny' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY, 'Dazzling' TIME OUT

Product Description
J.W. Wells seemed to be a respectable establishment, but the company now paying Paul Carpenter's salary is in fact a deeply sinister organisation with a mighty peculiar management team. Paul thought he was getting the hang of it (particularly when he fell head over heels for his strangely alluring colleague Sophie), but death is never far away when you work at J.W. Wells. Unlike the stapler - that's always going awol. Our lovestruck hero is about to discover that custard is definitely in the eye of the beholder. And that it really stings. Tom Holt's exceedingly comic fantasies are populated with evil goblins, annoying sprites and people like us. However, it's not always possible to tell the difference.

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Earth, Air, Fire and Custard
72% buy the item featured on this page:
Earth, Air, Fire and Custard 3.8 out of 5 stars (4)
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Barking
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
5 star:
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4 star:
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3 star:
 (2)
2 star:    (0)
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Average Customer Review
3.8 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A worthy end to a fine trilogy, 6 Feb 2005
By David Brain "Scurra" (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Earth, Air, Fire and Custard (Paperback)
People who have been following the career of Paul Carpenter ("The Portable Door" and "In Your Dreams") will think they have some idea of what is going on in this, the third book of the sequence. The hints dropped in the first two books (especially the whole "living sword" business that is over-emphasized at the end of In Your Dreams) tend to suggest that this will be more of the same. To some extent it is: yet more rogue partners at JW Wells, insight into Goblin society, new twists on the magic ideas and the usual insane inanity (or is that inane insanity?) that Holt specialises in.
And then the stakes suddenly pick up. Everything you thought you knew turns out to be almost, but not completely, wrong. Some brilliant retro-continuity makes you look at incidents in the first two books in a different way. Even the relationship between Paul and Sophie, which had been the thread of "normality" that ran through the books, is picked up, twisted around to breaking point and generally messed around with to a delightfully masochistic extent.
But... for me it was all a bit too much. The "hero" motif that Holt has explored before becomes a too convenient get-out, and by the end the plot has got so complicated that he even abandons any explanations to avoid a JK Rowling-like hundred page exposition (although I confess that the whole "not you again!" death sequences are very funny even at the end.)
Not the best of the three, but certainly a worthy conclusion to a fine sequence that is a step up from his previous work.
I don't know if Holt plans to revisit Paul in the future (I almost hope not) but for the moment this will do fine.
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18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars A slightly flat ending to a decent series, 24 Nov 2005
By Chris Chalk "Chris" (Croydon, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Earth, Air, Fire and Custard (Paperback)
Well the frankly bizarrely named Earth, Air, Fire and Custard is the third in the series involving Paul Carpenter at J.W. Wells & Co. Paul is in a quandary, his git of a boss Dennis Tanner has only gone and done the one thing that after all he has been through could shock Paul – offered him a promotion. I mean this promotion even ups his holiday allowance from zero to a whole seven days off a year – what more can he ask for??

Well to be left in peace for a start.

The first 100 pages or so off Paul's continuing adventures reinforce what we already know. Yes Paul is a cretin with the social skills of a rapid pit-bull. He’s basically a loser – we get it, no need to keep going on about it because believe me, Tom Holt does… The hero notion is pushed hard again during this outing and this can grate sometimes as well. That said we do finally get to see clearly what is meant by Paul being a hero, which is something.

This book is long and twisty. I mean there are more turns in this tale than at the Nuremberg Ring, although I occasionally was looking at the pages thinking this makes bugger all sense, on the whole this book does wrap up a lot of lose ends that have appeared through the previous two novels but also leaves a few of its own to remain untold but all in all a reasonable effort to clear things up.

Unfortunately that's the crux of it, this book is a reasonable effort – it’s not great but it’s not poor, the shame of it is that I finished it and didn't feel the series itself had lived up to my expectations and that annoyed me. If it had been an average series throughout I wouldn’t have minded but it wasn't, so I did.

Oh and before I forget Quixotic means “caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality” for when you get there.

I find it difficult to put my finger on why I wasn't enamoured with this outing but I guess it is in no small part to the overriding thought we have been going in circles for 3 books and essentially we are running over the same material time and again, it just gets a bit dull after a while. I would recommend people to read this to finish the series, and overall I would recommend the whole series to people but just bear in mind that it isn't as good as it should have been.

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2 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Another fine mess..., 1 May 2005
By J. M. Albinson "jen81965" (England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Earth, Air, Fire and Custard (Paperback)
I think Tom (or Thomas) Holt must have been writing this at the same time as "Meadowland"; there is considerable interconnection, and the style of this novel seems to have caught some of the wordiness of the Viking storytellers from "Meadowland". It's reminiscent of the sort of ride beloved of cyclists, hilly, twisty and very hard work- but you do get some marvellous views... Shame he didn't have time to prune a bit & make it punchier, though
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars very very good
I find Tom Holt's books very hit and miss but with this trilogy he is spot on. An excellent read.
Published 19 months ago by Alun Davies

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