Kept hidden by the United States government for decades, the Site is a place where magic is real. But that doesn't mean that everything happening there is sparkly. Soul-sucking policies and layers of stifling bureaucracy threaten to take all the fun out of magic.

Harris, a newbie Conjurer, starts his first day of work at the Site bursting with excitement: he's been brought on for an extremely big project happening the very next day. In a triumph over its habitual inefficiency, the Site manages to carry out its plan and conjure an actual dragon to be used by the military.

The dragon (Zoth-Avarex, the self-proclaimed greatest dragon in the multiverse) immediately eats the person next to him, snatches a “princess” from the ranks of the Conjuring Department, and flies away to the Space Needle. There he manipulates the media, outwits the Site's bumbling management, demands sixty-three billion dollars' worth of treasure (because Smaug was said to have had sixty-two billion in his hoard), threatens to destroy the city—and installs a couple of food trucks.

The “princess” is the twin sister of Harris's crush Ana, and the fiancée of his new friend Jake. Harris, Ana, and Jake team up with a rule-breaking magician on a quest to send the smart-ass, narcissistic dragon back from whence he came. They'll need to travel to storied realms in order to find the magical items needed to defeat the dragon. As they quest through red tape and various familiar fantasy elements, Harris will need to somehow make his timidity, inexperience, and idealism work for him. Meanwhile, tension rises as the “princess” has escape plans of her own, and the Site management sends an alternate hero off in a rowboat to visit a surfing Merlin—a mission that ends up a lot more perilous than anyone had anticipated.

While this book skewers the same fantasy genre it gleefully inhabits, it also pokes fun at corporate culture, today's obsession with wealth and celebrity, and our denial that life is anything more than meets the eye. Hapless Harris, believing in magic all along, learns to apply what he's picked up between the pages of fantasy literature.

K.R. R. Lockhaven

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