Wonderful escapism that I never wanted to end! The fun begins from the very beginning and peaks at its conclusion. This was my first Terry Brooks read, and it definitely won't be my last...

Fun fantasy. The theme of reinventing yourself was timely for me. The characters were likable and the plot moved along well. Will continue to read others in the series.

This is a review of the Kindle edition the book.

It is good that Kindle edition of this book is free, as no effert has been put into making it a sellable edition of the book.

The text has obviously been OCRed (Optical Character Recognition) in which a printed version of the book was scanned and mechanically converted back into text (vs. pictures of the printed page). This OCRed text was never proofread.

The "book" is filled with upside-down exclamation points, non-English accented characters, and numbers where letters should be. For example, in the middle of one sentence I found the characters "1.1", and the sentence made little sense. It took me awhile to figure out that "1.1" should really be "I. I" and that my 1 sentence was really 2 sentences. Also, the name of the land "Landover" is constantly mis-"typed" with random umlauts, accent marks, and/or spaces in the middle of the word. Words with apostrophes often shed the apostrophe and adjoining character (e.g., "'s") and some random character is put in their place. All signs of the OCR software guessing letters incorrectly.

That said, the errors are distracting but not insurmountable. You can read the book, but are jarred out of the experience by obvious errors that could have been corrected if an intern/outsourced employee had been given the task of proofreading the results of the OCR software. Most people skim a book, and your mind will learn to just skim over the most obvious and frequent errors.

I am considering buying the next book in the series (if it is for sale) but am concerned about the utter lack of quality exhibited by the publisher.

I wanted to like this book. It has an interesting premise, it is by a great writer, and I am really into fantasy and sci fi. I kept expecting the book to get better but it never did. The humor needs much improvement, the story line is very predictable, and the ending was just as dull as the whole. Just about the only thing I liked about this book was the price--free.

I was very surprised that I did not like the book. It got good reviews and it is a subject that I enjoy.

I really want to like this story, but there's a lot to be desired within the pages of Magic Kingdom. The main character is really the only character - we get more insight into the personality of a dragon than from our hero's love interest, for example.

There is very little of note in Landover - even though Ben, our main character, signed up for the stereotypical fantasy land, there needs to be something creative or new about it to make it worthwhile for the rest of us to read. It's cute - and nothing more.

That actually sums up most of Magic Kingdom - cute, but little beneath the surface.

Now I know why this was free. It was awful and I never finished it. Too tedious.

Enjoyable bubblegum(brain candy as opposed to brain food book) fantasy...brooks tells a good story, and free is an excellent price. The problem with the kindle version is that there are a fair number of typos and scanning errors that pop up throughout the book. I wish that the publishers thought this sort of thing through, because a well-formatted freebie would certainly sell more Terry Brooks books in the future than an error-riddled one. I'd like to have more Terry Brooks, but I think I will be viewing samples before I purchase them.

I was surprised that the main character stayed after realizing what a difficult world he'd entered. Rarely am I invested in a character so quickly. I was proud of his decisions and happy with the results.

An interesting fantasy. Just what one Ben Holiday Attorney at Law needed but didn't really expect. Only a trick is what he was thinking first. Once reaching believability at one level all the rest seemed just as believable.

There were a few slow downs in the plot, though wading through the adventure it did become more exciting to imagine being with this odd group. There was plenty of danger and surprises too.

I gave a 5 rating because I simply enjoyed the story and wanted to discover the final outcome from every point of the tale of Ben Holidays trip to a challenging new life.

I downloaded this for my Kindle and was pleasantly surprised at how much of a page turner it is. I haven't read fantasy in years, and this one is very good. Well written and imaginative. I enjoyed the premise of the hard-nosed but burned out lawyer entering a fantasy world where he struggles to accept what he knows cannot be real. I started reading this before getting on a flight in LA to NY, and I didn't put it down until 3 am that next morning. Great escapist book too.

I read the review for this book and decided to read it. I got a copy from the local library and almost returned it before reading it. The cover page looked like an horrible amatuer rendering of some fantasy land. But what the hay, I had nothing else to read. So forth I plunged into the book and was surprised by how taken I was into the story. I found myself laughing out loud to some parts.

Ben, a widowed lawyer from Chicago was very unhappy with his current life. He found an ad that promised adventure in a 'fairy tale kingdom' one that he thought was made up with special effects and costumed characters. But when he arrives he find true adventure and magic. The story follows him and his small band of misfit followers along his quest to restore the old kingdom to its original state.

It is a heart warming book worth the read.

I believe that higher rankings for a book should be reserved for a really good book. This was a silly and really fast read. It was not deep and was not that entertaining.

3 stars is generous.

O yea lots of errors in the kindle version - but hey it was free.

In Terry Brooks' humorous fantasy MAGIC KINGDOM FOR SALE--SOLD!, lawyer Ben Holiday is introduced to the world of magic through a classified ad in the newspaper. Though reputedly a good lawyer, poor Ben is desperate to escape personal tragedy and doesn't do all of his homework. He winds up owning a magical kingdom in chaos, a comical disaster of immense proportions. Can he salvage his investment? Can good old American can-do spirit and a healthy dose of capitalist common sense bring the magical Kingdom of Landover around? Maybe not, at least not without genuine displays of heroism, a bit of magic, and some help from his new friends.

The first book in a short series, MAGIC KINGDOM is probably the best as well. It's a fast and unchallenging read, perfect for vacations and airports. Compared to Terry Pratchett's popular Discworld series, Brooks' humor is broader, his wit less sharp, and the targets easier. On the other hand, Brooks' central characters are more sympathetic and a bit less cartoony than Pratchett's. Since it requires only the most cursory familiarity with classical high fantasy to appreciate, I don't hesitate to recommend it to anybody in the mood for some light fantasy.

This book started off slowly, then got much better towards the middle. If you read the Author's biography, the slow start makes a bit more sense (he was a lawyer before becoming an author).

The Kindle edition has a LOT of scanning errors, tons of upside down exclaimation points, words crammed together, and other words torn in two.

Now that I've finished this book, I was really disappointed to see the sequel books are not available for the kindle, only the most recent book in the series, which means skipping several chapters. :(

I read the Magic Kingdom series when they first came out. Thought they were really great. So, when I saw the first book in the series - "Magic Kingdom for Sale - Sold!" being offered for free in the Kindle version, I immediately grabbed it.

I started reading it but have found a lot of formatting errors that are a bit annoying. For some reason, in many instances, the exclamation point (!) is inserted upside down. How could that happen? Other instances are words that are hyphenated in the middle of a sentence, as if the word was originally at the end of a row and was supposed to continue to the next one.

There were a few other words that were missing. I had to laugh when the beginning of a sentence started out "FU" and that was it.

I've read many books on the Kindle so far, even Brooks' first Shannara Trilogy and didn't notice any formatting errors. So, I guess the whole reason for releasing this book as a freebie was due to the poor formatting. I'm at the beginning where Ben just made the purchase and he's driving to the entry point of the Kingdom and all these errors are annoying to see.

Is there a way to report the formatting problems to the publisher? I can give them examples but I don't want to spend time listing every single one, all they have to do is read the kindle version and the mistakes just jump out at you. Obviously the Kindle version wasn't proofread.

I may purchase the next one in the series in Kindle format but if it contains just as many errors, I won't buy the rest.

To summarize: Great story, lousy kindle formatting! I would give it 5 stars but it loses 1 because of the formatting errors.

What a fun, campy read. I read this book because of kindle's free promotion of it. It turned out to be very good and would be worth paying regular price for. I wish it had been a little bit longer and detailed but I guess the author left it open for future installments. This is a great book to read on vacation...enjoy!

There are some very interesting and compelling elements in Magic Kingdom, however, the continuous self-pity exhibited by High Lord Ben for me ultimately kills any positive momentum the author has managed to convey. Ben's fixation on Annie this and Annie that plus his sometimes schizophrenic attitude about fear made it difficult for me to relate to him. As an example of his attitude about fear, he's not afraid to go running or swimming by himself in a strange, unknown land even after being warned of possible dangers, yet in other situations he's positively apoplectic with fear when placed in situations where it is not even clear there is something to be afraid of. Again, parts of the story are very compelling but to me they are weighed down by the protagonist's perpetual self-pity and inconsistent personality characteristics.

I've owned this series for a long time. And love it. When travelling recently, I finished all the Amazon Kindle books on my iPod, so I "bought" (it's free) this one. And enjoyed it. But it was clearly scanned and not edited well after. Many upside-down exclamation points. Sentence sets like "...more than I. I don't think..." became "... than 1.1 don't think...". "I'll" also became 1.1. Even the country name (Lan-Dover most of the time) was screwed up a bit.

It was still readable easily, but this seemed sloppy. So five stars for the book, less one for the typos.