Rumo - Walter Moers

[goodreads]

Title: Rumo: And His Miraculous Adventures
Author: Walter Moers
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 4.5/5
# pages: 688
Date read: July, 2010

Rumo is a little Wolperting - a domesticated creature somewhere between a deer and a dog - who will one day become the greatest hero in the history of Zamonia. Armed with Dandelion, his talking sword, he fights his way through the Overworld and the Netherworld. He meets Rala, a beautiful Wolperting female; Urs of the Snows, who thinks more of cooking than of fighting; Gornab the Ninety-Ninth, the demented king of Netherworld; Professor Ostafan Kolibri, who goes in search of the Non-Existent Teenies; Professor Abdullah Nightingale, inventor of the Chest-of-Drawers Oracle; and, worst luck, the deadly Metal Maiden.

Walter Moers is a fairly new discovery, but so far I've loved everything I've read by him. This was no exception, although it started out a lot more slowly than the other books, so took me longer to get thoroughly hooked. However, by the time Rumo made it to Wolperting, there was no looking back.

I love Walter Moers' quirky humour, and the way he lets the book medium help him tell a story and set an atmosphere. Rumo was a lot darker than the two other books, and it seemed like Walter Moers tried to combine more plotlines and tangents than he perhaps should have. The reasons for some of the digressions sometimes didn't become obvious until several hundreds of pages later.

A terrific book, and I came to care a lot for the characters and the universe both. Fortunately I still have one Zamonian book left to read.