Walter Moers decided to branch out and do something wildly different. Okay, maybe not wildly: there's still much absurdity going on. But it's not Zamonien. Instead, it's the story of Gustave Doré, the famous painter. Or rather, his paintings. Or rather, all of his paintings, shoved together into a rather trippy (but entertaining!) story.

Rumo was a lot of fun. Not as grand as Bluebear, not as nerdy as the book city, but a very good take on adventure books noneteless. Hitting all the tropes without being unintentionally cheesy. Probably the closest you can come to The Princess Bride with non-human protagonists.

Bluebear was a great book. This is an okay book – more experimental in ways, and definitely less astounding. Where Bluebear means that you get an even balance of action and snark, and the City of Dreaming Book works even when you don't get literary snark, this book is just literary snark. I enjoyed it, but it's hard to recommend to anybody.

Even though I love the Zamonien books as much as anybody, this … was not it. This book is an encyclopaedia for the fictional continent Zamonien, as a tie-in for all the other books by Walter Moers. And I understand everybody who loved it, in a nostalgic way, thinking back to when they first read the Zamonion books. But damn, this is so limited, like a big missed chance.

Well, this was an exercise in disappointment. The follow-up book to the City of Dreaming Books is strictly worse than its predecessor. It reads as if Moers needed money and so decided to make a bad B-movie following his great blockbuster. Nearly put me off reading future Moers books entirely.

I wasn't the biggest fan of this book, possibly because I thought that I had to read the book it was satirising first. I didn't have to do that, and it wasn't a lot of fun. I was impressed with the food porn though – when Moers sets his mind to really describing something, you're going to notice.