"A Quandary of Fibbles" by Howard Denson tells the story of Princess Esmeralda in the Kingdom of Quandary. She is in love with a clumsy knight, Sir Jonathan d'Klutz, but her father, King Geoffrey the Grouch, despises her suitor. Sir Jonathan's protectors are Sweet Margaret (whom children call "Mag the Hag with the Sagging Bags") and Fred, Ted, Ed, and Ned, the talking heads on the pikes at Hogmoor Castle. They try to protect the young knight, but he decides to prove his merit by taming the rampaging Sir Bull in the pasture near the castle. Unfortunately, Sir Bull dispatches the youth and then does in the princess when she rushes to his side. Their spirits then begin migrations over the centuries until she ends up in a pot-bellied stove and he in the body of Johnny the Junkman. Sweet Margaret has given the Talking Heads the mission of looking out for the two so they can be united at some point. Meanwhile, King Fengon from Miasmort has been trying to destroy Quandary, and Esmeralda's lascivious sister, Princess Ethel the Ready But Remember She's the King's Daughter, assembles a team of the Talking Heads, four headless country boys, and a raven to face the challenge of the Miasmorticians. The book can be viewed as a collection of fibbles (part fable and part fib, but always poetically true), or even as a family saga novel since it takes generations for the story to be resolved. It tips its hat to medieval troubadours, Thurber, Aesop, Freberg, Fractured Tales, and Python, plus Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam.
About the Author: Howard Denson is a newspaper-Navy brat who has mainly moved from one part of the South to another. A native of Jasper, Alabama, he has been living in Jacksonville, Florida, since the administration of Saint Richard the Reluctant Confessor. He describes himself as a former flunky journalist for The Birmingham News, The Bessemer News, The Tallahassee Democrat, The Pensacola News-Journal, and the Escambia Press. At what is now Florida State College at Jacksonville, he taught composition, literature, and creative writing, plus humanities courses in the ancient world and Middle Ages, the Renaissance to the modern world, art appreciation, American art and culture. He estimates that he "taught at" 15,000 students during his near four-decade career. He was closely involved in a town-and-gown writers' conference, the Florida First Coast Writers' Festival, and attended similar conferences at Samford University, Birmingham-Southern College, the University of Florida, and especially at St. Petersburg's excellent Florida Suncoast Writers' Conference. He has been an editor and/or contributor to The State Street Review, The Penchant, The International Journal of Elvisology and the Elvian Era, The Write Stuff, The FCCFF Update, and Kassandra's Kitchen. He writes some poety and has been published in Kalliope and the Asheville Poetry Review. He helped run and judge contests in novels, short fiction, poetry, and plays. He and his smarter bride of thirty-six years Michele Boyette currently have seven four-legged children: the meowers, Eddie, CeeCee, Billy, Wally, Frieda, and Amber; and the barkers, Mr. Darcy and Daphne. He writes "Kassandra's Kitchen" at this website: http: //howarddenson.webs.com