When I saw that one of the bingo squares for this year’s bingo focused on food, I knew that I would be reading Party of Fools for this readathon. What a better choice for the Feast Your Eyes on This than a series called Empire of Eats? This book is marketed as a comedy, but come expecting silly rather than a full-on comedy. It had a surprising amount of anti-imperialist content than I was expecting. This is not a farce with food; it’s something more akin to how Discworld uses comedy to explore real issues – though stylistically the two are different styles of comedic fantasy. The blurb says ‘Make sure you have some good food on hand, because you’re bound to get hungry along the way‘ and truer words have never been written.
I came looking for a light read after Autobiography of Red, and I left with some of the most fun I’ve had in ages.
Read If Looking For: charcuterie boards, autistic viewpoint characters, breezy prose, D&D misadventure vibes
Avoid If Looking For: books that demand attention to understand, trope-free stories, realistic dialogue
Elevator Pitch:
Reed and Gladys are retired from their day jobs. Now the Bard and Barbarian moonlight as members of the Resistance, which makes it quite the coincidence when the Immortal Emperor walks into the bar that Gladys’ son runs. Vallora is looking for a break from the life of nobility and to try good food, her chief guard Andromeda is frantically searching the city for her, and the two rebels see an opportunity to strike a blow against the empire. But first, we must eat!
What Worked for Me
It took me a minute to warm up to McCloud’s style of comedy. Once I got 25 pages in, I was smirking and chuckling to myself constantly. McCloud found a really specific tone, and it worked well for me. It’s an easy style of prose combined with stories that are happy to indulge tropes and archetypes, many liberally stolen from D&D. However, everyone is just a little bit self-aware of the story beat they’re inhabiting, and oftentimes McCloud exaggerates his descriptions in a way that feels both stupid and indulgent. Take this snippet from Andromeda as she gets sidetracked while hunting down the Emperor.
She had stumbled into an actual, real, live Backstage, and was about to witness a very unsanctioned, absolutely illegal, borderline blasphemous play. Presumably by unregistered actors. This was abhorrent, appalling, absolutely heinous, and it was also amazing.
Something about it really sings. An example of masterful prose? Not really, but it was relentlessly fun and joyful. The whole novella has a layer of artificiality, like you’re walking through Disneyland aware of how plastic everything around you is. However, Party of Fools is in on its own joke, allowing McCloud to play with expectations to dramatize situations. A strict rule-follower guard gets so distracted by their love of theater that they stop their quest to watch an illegal show. She is in personal heaven and also disgusted that she’s wasting time and also the show is very much worth investigating and reporting on. The veneer of Sunday morning cartoons covers the entire story, and it gets leveraged to great effect. Don’t come expecting anything realistic though, and you’ll leave disappointed.
I assumed the whole novella would focus on low-stakes silliness. Ah yes the rich person experiences pizza eaten without a fork! That sort of thing. Instead, McCloud added a more serious anti-imperial rebellion plotline with matching thematic work that was overt and effective. The brunt of this came from Vallora (the Emperor) being the epitome of kindly rich people who don’t understand how money warps their perception of the world. Lots of eye rolling from Gladys and Reed and internal monologue. Vallora calls a dish ‘thrifty’ for being composed of leftovers, but its really a reflection of how scavenging scraps is the only way for citizens of the ever-expanding empire survive. Andromeda goes through a similar arc, noticing the plethora of orphanages filled with kids from foreign conquests, but not able to make the jump to how the Empire is causing orphans in the first place. Only the seeds of deprogramming have been planted – and I’m suspicious that Vallora may actually be more aware than she lets on – but Book 2 looks to explore this even more overtly. Party of Fools isn’t going to win any awards for its thematic work, but it’s far higher quality than these sorts of light & fluffy fantasy stories tend to go, making this a popcorn read with teeth.
Final note from this rave review. Lots of great representation in this novella. Most notably, we’ve got asexual and aromantic representation that is a total nonissue, a guard with Autism written very thoughtfully, with both trans and sapphic side characters. I don’t have anything special to say here, other than that it was all handled well.
What Didn’t Work for Me
In general, this book is easy to love, though it’s a very specific vibe. The balloon-animal characters that McCloud’s writes so well only work if you like the schtick. When one gets under your skin, it becomes more annoying than fun. Thankfully, this only happened once for me, a bratty noble child who is far more excited about everything in a way that exhausts me (I’m a grump, I know!). Sadly she features prominently on the cover of book 2 … so I’m gearing up for that, because I’m absolutely reading the sequel.
I loved it. I can acknowledge that it isn’t the most ambitious or complex story out there, but it was dopamine in book form.
Conclusion: riotously silly and great fun
Marked for Plot 