The mad knight and his earthy squire continue their legendary journey through a Spain that no longer believes in chivalry. Don Quixote remains steadfast in his beautiful delusion, seeing giants where there are only windmills, princesses where there are only clever peasant girls, and glory where there is only certain defeat. His squire Sancho Panza follows faithfully, trading barbed wit with his master while secretly hoping for the governorship of some distant island. Together they stumble toward adventure, each step more absurd than the last. In this installment, the sharp-witted Dorothea enters their orbit, and the knight eagerly takes up her cause. Sancho, meanwhile, faces a crisis: his beloved donkey Dapple has been stolen. The loss devastates him in ways his master's imagined slights never could. This is the novel's eternal magic, the collision between grand chivalric fantasy and the very real concerns of hunger, loyalty, and a missing donkey. The humor lands hard, but so does something sadder: the portrait of a man so lost in books that he can no longer see the world as it is, yet somehow remains oddly heroic in his refusal to stop trying.
