Ribbon
Take an epic Norse poem and make it about candy, soda, and staying up late watching cartoons way too loud. The art is gorgeous and I laughed aloud at several parts. This would be great to read aloud in a group, competing to be the most dramatic.
The art is black and white only, which may be a deal breaker for some kids. Otherwise this can be enjoyed by all ages.
Garlic is a little sentient garlic-headed person who works with other vegetable and fruit people to work a witch's farm. She's an anxious little thing but she's nominated to investigate the old castle nearby when a vampire moves in. It's all very cute and I love the art.
All the filler mysteries finally pay off with actual story progression AND backstory!
James is recruited to play as the dungeon in a new VRMMORPG. During the day he attends high school (dealing with bullies and negligent teachers) and at night he hops in her emersion pod to manage his dungeon (dealing with bullying from the lead developer for some reason.) Time is experienced at an accelerated rate in the virtual world, one day for every hour in real world time, so while the real-virtual time is technically balanced, far more of the book is the video game. Being a dungeon is secret, so his only confident is a drunk, gambling addicted advanced AI fairy.
This first book is focused on dungeon building and watching players experience the dungeon. James's dungeon is “Random” type, so he doesn't know what kind of monsters he's working with until he starts building each floor, and his options are always weird.
DCO is set a few decades in the future. There are lots of references to other LitRPG books and pop culture throughout the years. James doesn't get all the references and sometimes looks them up but other times it's just an easter egg for the reader. If you don't get all the references, that's not going to hamper your enjoyment. But being familiar with “dungeon core” style books might help.
Audiobook performed by Travis Baldree, who is excellent as always.
Pretty typical historical romance, with etiquette and wealth and lineage concerns. The setting makes it interesting. Jim Crow laws blanket the south and threaten to move into Chicago. The parents generation and older includes former slaves. Two characters are half white. It all adds weight to a story that would be middling if set in Regency or Victorian times.
All the “redshirt” characters are interchangeable, which is the point, but it's also frustrating. There's a scene at the very end of the book where the main character and another guy are reflecting on what's happened and I spent half the time trying to remember who the other guy was. Wil Wheaton doesn't even attempt to vary his voice between characters. Still a good concept and story but characterization is null.
The audiobook is eight hours except when the story ends you've still got two hours left on the clock. There are three alternate perspective stories in the remaining time.
Characters talk around each other and many misunderstandings stem from the the main character suddenly being unable to speak aloud. It's the most annoying kind of noble-political drama.
The first half of this volume is taken up by Aristia's execution and flashbacks to what led up to the execution. Then we're thrust back to Aristia at age ten, with full memories and PTSD, trying to find a way out of her doomed betrothal. The age difference is jarring, from hot angst to cute sad.
This book is full color, so it should be easy to tell characters apart with the rainbow of hair colors. It is not. All the adult men have the same face. There are few enough women and children that those groups aren't confusing, at least.
Content warning: Miscarriage
Abandoned around a third of the way through. Murder, child murder, torture, child rape, and sections written in second person are all sins contributing to my dropping this book.
Playing an otome game, a girl finds herself stuck in the game as the villainess. We've seen this dozens of times by now. What makes this story stand out is it takes place during the game timeline and she's stuck with the multiple choice answers from the game, which are all terrible. It's frustrating to read, so thankfully she unlocks free will after a few chapters.
Penelope's life is otome game hard mode, both playing the mobile game and being stuck in it. It's not the “everyone loves me” power fantasy as these stories usually end up. Expect a lot of bullying, suffering, and danger.
The art is full color throughout and quite vibrant. All the guys have different hair colors so it's easy to tell all the important characters apart.
This book starts off annoying, gets better, and then crashes and burns.
The annoying: Jason is a very chatty person and starts off his adventure alone and ends up talking to himself. A lot. He's also completely nude. There's a lot of middle school humor and bodily fluids - blood, vomit, puss - in the first chunk of the book. I almost quit reading.
Better: Still obnoxiously chatty but with lots of characters to bounce off of. So many characters I had trouble keeping track of them all. The audiobook reader helps differentiate some. The world mechanics are interesting but leveling is very slow.
Crash & Burn: One of the prominent female characters gets fridged. No one else of note dies, just the female character so the guys can build character and bro-mourn. I'd been ready to pick up the second book until this moment. Instead it's another series for the isekain't pile.
Florence is an insufferable old biddy, but I grew to like her eventually. Her partner/guide comes off as the other kind of annoying old person, the overly educated one who always knows the best way to do everything. They make for a good pair. I also liked most of the main adventuring party.
But the trouble with a kitty-themed dungeon is having to read about kitty deaths! They respawn with all their experiences and personality so it's not kitty perma-death. The details are glossed over for the adventurers you're supposed to like, but once the bad guys come along it's really gruesome.
I hate to say “too many cats” but it got really hard to keep track after a while. Some had names that made it easier to remember but there are a lot of interchangeable tabby brawlers.
This whole volume is bookkeeping. Wrap up a few story elements, pretend to end Maomao's service in the Inner Court, undo the ending, and land exactly where the dang book started.
And in case you felt nostalgic for all the dead baby talk from volume one, have some more talk of dead babies.
We've reached the modern criminal investigations stage of Maomao's absurd detective journey. She doesn't have the tech of an episode of CSI but her scientific deductions are over the top and she even shows the actual professionals how to dust for finger prints.
It feels weird to say, but I think this would be more believable as an isekai story. A modern day truecrimes fangirl sent to an ancient China-like world.
Unnatural Laws is a sci-fi isekai rather than the fantasy flavor I usually enjoy. Large gatherings of people are getting portaled to an alien world, seemingly at random. The few who survive the alien environment beyond the first few minutes are thrown into a series of trials to pare them down further.
The first few trials are solo challenges and Emma only has her “guide” Suri to talk to. They're extremely linear and feel like an extended tutorial. The trials alternate between survival skills and obsticle courses. I was pretty sick of the formula by the time Emma made it to the next stage.
The next stage tosses all the survivors into a large zone to form teams and complete a few fetch quests to proceed further. Emma teams up with the first people she sees and butts heads with the obligatory bully group. Like the trials, the training and banter drags on a little too long before the plot gets moving again.
The writing is really good and the sci-fi is plausible enough for me. The system buzzwords are half standard LitRPG fare and half nonsense I started tuning out. The story is still good even if you don't have patience for learning a whole new vocabulary.
Sacred Cat Island is a mysterious cozy story about family, in particular brothers. Rowan, his brother, and their dad move to an island that seems to follow its own rules. There are at least as many cats there as human residents, along with mysterious spirits, magic, and niche technology.
The game mechanics includes a quest system which largely works as a chore and request list. Everyone has inventory slots equal to their age in years, so Rowan can carry thirteen things while his brother can only carry ten. Stats are displayed at the start of each day but aren't really relevant. Rowan's empathy might increase when he showed empathy the previous day but you could figure that out from the prose.
This is a kid-appropriate book that's also enjoyable for adults. The Ghibli comparison in the blurb is very apt.
While the book title makes it clear this is Pride and Prejudice related, the story takes place in the Jane Austen Literary Universe. Familiarity with all Austen books is helpful and it can be hard to follow without. Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility are probably the most important to know.
This is a closed circle mystery. The characters are unable to leave the house party due to bad weather and then because the investigation is underway. We get scenes from the perspective of every character present, all but two of which are from Jane Austen novels. Mr Jonathan Darcy and Miss Juliet Tilney are original characters and both very enjoyable. Despite the variety of perspectives, figuring out who done it is a challenge.
Content warning: Death of a child discussed. Unpleasant but historically accurate views on certain minority groups voiced by characters.
For anyone who enjoys seeing the wild things authors do with public domain properties, Pride and Premeditation is an excellent addition to the genre. The story is still set in the Regency period but moves from the English countryside to London and all characters go down a rank. Mr Bennet is a barrister and Mr Collins is a soliciter in his law firm.
Character personalities are similar to the original but the timeline is condensed to a week and some elements are dropped entirely. Even knowing the source material well, the story is fresh and exciting. Don't get your hopes up for a Jane/Bingley romance - the two don't even meet until the book is nearly over.
Diehard Austen loyalists won't enjoy this but it's good fun for the casual fan.
Say goodbye to that idealized view of Regency England! We're going to hear about hygiene, health care, food safety, women's rights, worker's rights, and so much more! Courtney doesn't play along with her change of circumstance very well, leading to SO MANY cringe-worthy moments.
I appreciate the traditional depiction of the fae and the tales referenced throughout the journal. Unfortunately the rest didn't work for me. Emily goes to a northern island village just before winter and everything is terrible. The cottage, the food, the locals, the sheep, the pre-winter snows. I set the book aside for two weeks because the sheep were such jerks! Her coworker Bambleby showing up fixes some of those things and she can dedicate her energy toward complaining about him.
Emily ends up in peril and requiring rescue a lot. Her knowledge of fae stories helps resolve many conflicts but her overconfidence lands her in even more peril.
The story is a bit more consistent than the first book. Tacca is often boring but the dwarves and adventurer town developing around the dungeon is pretty solid. There are occasional chapters from dungeon fairy bosses, which fleshes out their society a little more.
Audiobook quality is awful. You can hear where different takes are edited together and the audio is not consistent at all. I assume it was recorded from home in an improvised studio.
Maomao's skills as an apothecary really shine in this volume. She's assigned to cure an ailing concubine, then forced to attend a party with all the concubines, their maids, the emperor, every other high ranking official around. The politics of the inner court really gets fleshed out. Maomao also gets to express a “tough girl from the bad side of town” persona, which is great.
The first volume was underwhelming but the second volume turned things around.
The beginning is good, the middle is reading a textbook, and the end is torture porn. I did not finish torture porn. I kind of wish I'd stopped at textbook. The beginning is interesting though.
I do have a new appreciation of the Star Trek: Next Gen episode Chain of Command, however.
The story of Rapunzel retold with rats. Instead of long hair, she has a long tail. It's reasonably close to original versions of the fairy tale. It's cute.
