Clio, the muse of history, has a problem connected with the twenty-eighth chronicle of Xanth.

When she sits down to write it, she discovers that it has already been written—and unintelligibly. So the scholarly lady must repair to the real Xanth, where she is sent by the Good Magician Humfrey on a quest to save two pocket-sized dragons, Drew and Drusie, who are essential to the environment of Xanth.

Naturally, the quest is successful—Anthony does not trade in tragedy in his best-known series--and what is more, along the way Clio finds true love with the magician Sherlock and meets a good many of the ongoing characters in the Xanth series.

If latest entry in said series features a more mature heroine (still obsessed with her figure, however) and less of the adult conspiracy and stork-summoning that has marked some of its recent predecessors, the puns for which the Xanthian corpus is famous are as numerous and outrageous as ever.