★★★☆☆ Piers Anthony's perfect woman

A Spell for Chameleon

Piers Anthony

** spoiler alert **

I'm not sure when I read this -- the 1995 date I've entered is just a guess. It was the first Piers Anthony novel I read. It was imaginative and somewhat fun, but I was put off by the casual sexism. I went on to read other Anthony works, and that never goes away. Whenever a female character walks on stage, Anthony dissects her physical attractiveness, in anatomical detail. He cannot apparently imagine a female character without discussing how sexually attractive she is.

The title character of A Spell for Chameleon, Chameleon, is a woman whose magic (everyone in Xanth is magic) is that she waxes and wanes in intelligence and beauty over the course of a monthly cycle. Intelligence and beauty are out of phase, so that when she is highly intelligent she is ugly, and when she is beautiful she is so stupid as to be barely capable of coherent speech. Our hero Bink, when he figures this out, describes her as the Perfect Woman, combining in one person the best that a woman can be.

Chameleon thus embodies the nonsensical principle (typical of all Anthony's work that I have read) that a woman cannot be both attractive and intelligent.

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