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Margaret Ball's Lost in Translation, a portal fantasy about a college student who accidentally ends up in Fantasyland on her way to spend a semester abroad in Europe, is not just a nineties fantasy novel but in fact THE MOST NINETIES FANTASY OF ALL. Our Heroine Allie probably hung out with Cher from Clueless in high school; now she is in college, she totes a Walkman and a giant backpack of spare batteries all the way around Fantasyland, and Margaret Ball wastes no opportunity to remind us that she is constantly listening to Pearl Jam and Hootie and the Blowfish.

That is one of my favorite things about the book. My other favorite thing is how it takes poor clueless Allie a solid hundred pages to figure out that Fantasyland is not actually JUST EUROPE. She has a lot of conversations that go like this:

ALLIE: So everybody seems to walk everywhere here at school! I guess this town is a pedestrian zone?
FANTASYLANDER: . . . what else would we do, fly?
ALLIE: Oh, that sophisticated European sense of humor!

FANTASYLANDER: Allie, how about we go to the market to buy you a bolt of fabric for the tailor to make into a tunic and trousers for you?
ALLIE: Golly, bespoke tailors? People here are so trendy about their clothes! None of this mass-produced junk here! EUROPEANS, AMIRITE

FANTASYLANDER: I am off to magic class to learn some magic to protect our magic land from the magic monsters that beset it.
ALLIE: Huh, who knew Europeans were so into D&D?

Allie's cluelessness also extends into people skills, as her nineties Silicon Valley-child daddy issues promptly lead her to imprint like a baby duckling on the evil mage who summoned her into fantasyland to begin with. She ends up as his lab assistant, and is so haplessly excited to have a real job for the first time in her life that even the evil mage is like, "man, too bad I have to ritually sacrifice her for my evil plans, it'll be like killing a sweet dim kitten."

Allie actually overhears this conversation, with the aftermath as follows:

EVIL MAGE: I am totally not planning to ritually sacrifice you, despite having plainly said so ten seconds ago. That was ALL A MISUNDERSTANDING, would you like straight As in all your first-year classes?
ALLIE: Oh my god, you're trying to BRIBE ME WITH A GRADE?!?!
EVIL MAGE: Wait, what?
ALLIE: I bet you're going to fire me as your lab assistant too!
EVIL MAGE: Yes, because you will be sacrificed -- wait, what?
ALLIE: You never loved me at all! JUST LIKE DADDY.
EVIL MAGE: ??????

Then she trips and cracks her head open on the floor. The evil mage is so relieved that he decides to drop out for a glass of wine before completing the ritual sacrifice, which gives Our Brooding Hero With a Tragic Backstory time to conveniently drop in and rescue her so they can get on with their quest through Fantasyland.

Meanwhile, one of Allie's school friends gets tragically transformed into a sentient phallic clay pot. I just feel like this is worth mentioning.

My other other other favorite part: when Allie makes the decision to go back to Fantasyland at the end, and her hippie California mother generously donates her weed money to help Allie a plane ticket back to the magic portal.

THE NINETIES.

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Wow.

IT WAS GREAT.

...What.

*cracking up*

The nineties were a wonderful, magical time. :D

Edited 2013-06-14 10:57 (UTC)

Aww, I remember this book! But no other Margaret Ball book will stick with me quite the way Mathemagics did.

I never read Mathemagics! I think this was the only Ball I ever found at my local bookstore. What was that one about?

I found Mathemagics on the leave a book/take a book shelf in a vacation rental when I was pretty young. It's very '80s (one of the minor characters is a gifted boy who is being oppressed with ritalin by school system bureaucrats who just don't understand!!), about an immigrant to our dimension who is trying to put her daughter through school and get herself an education in math while having no marketable skills other than fighting bad guys in skimpy armor (as is the way of her people). It's kind of adorable. The climax of the book takes place at a science fiction writers' convention, and is where I learned that the plural of "fan" is "fen".

Awww, that sounds kind of adorable! This is actually ringing vague bells for me now -- I think I must have had some kind of near-purchase experience, although I'm fairly sure I never actually read it.

Looking it up, apparently when I said 1980s, I meant 1996. You can see the utterly trashy-yet-representative cover here -- though it deeply confused child!me that the skimpy armor described in the book and the skimpy armor depicted on the cover did not seem to be the same at all! That was the beginning of the end of my faith in covers as illustrative diagrams.

The cover is pretty great too, and I think really conveys a lot of the same things as your review does!

I KNOW OH MY GOSH. The carefully pre-ripped jeans!

I can confirm that Europe is, in fact, exactly like that.

I KNEW IT.

So... Allie thinks Europeans are hipsters before hipsters are a thing.

I'm charmed.

Also a sentient phallic clay pot. I just had to comment to... acknowledge that I saw this, because I don't know what to comment about and this also charms me in a very 90s way and a sort of MAN WHY WERE ALL MY FANTASY BOOKS SO BORING!?

IT'S SO WEIRDLY CHARMING. It's like a dose of concentrated nostalgia in book form. Some days I'm really sad -- okay, many days I'm really sad -- that trends in publishing have moved away from truly cracked-out fantasy with cheesy bubble-gum-candy covers and into the realm of grimdark and serious. Let's move back!

*snerks* This sounds utterly hilarious.

WELL, I LAUGHED

That sounds hilarious. Surprisingly, I missed this one too! I think I was too busy reading "Master of Five Magics" and "The Unlikely Ones." Um, and Dragonlance. Though that was more eighties, I think.

Hee, I actually managed to somehow skip almost entirely over both Dragonlance and Drizzt -- though I'm not sure why, I would totally have eaten them up if I'd happened to encounter them. Oh, but I did read one Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman series; as far as I remember, it was the one about an evil baby prince who became even more evil and his hapless followers who are therefore also stuck being basically evil. I am sure that narrows it down a lot.

I don't know which one that was, but for a truly cracktastic experience, their Darksword trilogy cannot be matched. It consists of two and a half books of epic fantasy following a boy who is Destined To Destroy The World, a bunch of entertaining supporting characters, and an extremely detailed magic system.

It then throws in a genuinely surprising plot twist, concluding in a hilariously OMGWTFBBQ conclusion. It's especially cracktastic because, despite being pretty much the last thing I expected, it was, in retrospect, clearly foreshadowed from the very beginning.

I think I remember reading your writeup of that! I LOL'D.