Ribbon
Qube has proven some level of sentience, so now the Chosen One and Developers want to see if the rest of the party can grow. There are more elemental temples to clear, character sidequests to unlock, and optional content to explore.
The lighthearted tone of the first book get weighed down by increasing existential crises as the story continues. It moves closer to making readers question the ethics of how they treat video game characters. Sexy Screaming Spider Lady's innuendo game gets stronger as she takes more control of her dialog. Still nothing too adult but more of it actually makes sense.
Prophecy Approved Companion is set inside a game but the main character is an NPC rather than a human player. Qube should have died in an opening cutscene but the hero manages to glitch the game so she survives. She tags along as he continues to break the world.
The first third of the book is okay, but as Qube deviates from her programming the story picks up. Qube is an interesting perspective character and her eventual existential crisis's are delicious. The Chosen One starts out obnoxious but gets better over time. Other companion characters join up as the story progresses.
The game world and game story feel like an old school RPG, similar to Lunar: The Silver Star Story. The tone is mostly light and humorous. One of the companion characters is the “sexy” archetype, who makes constant innuendo that usually falls flat. The game censors the player's swearing. I'd call it fine for younger teens.
Aliens give Earth advance notice that a “system apocolypse” is going to activate, giving people time to prepare. Bad news for anyone who thinks “strength in numbers” is a good idea, because population centers seem to attract stronger monsters.
That's not an issue for Haley. She's living with her grandma in a small rural town (southern United States, maybe Louisiana.) It has starting town energy - weak critter monsters and food items as quest rewards. Haley experiments with magic and helps her grandma figure out how things work now.
It's all very cozy, as the title suggests. There are a lot of Christian references and imagery. Grandma is very religious and Haley seems less so. Having read a bit of the second book, there's more God stuff to come so maybe skip the series if that's going to annoy you.
12/29/2023: Star rating reduced due to AI audiobook.
First off, the worldbuilding is excellent. Cool magic systems, cool world.
It is the nature of a time loop that “nothing happens” but this story truly drags. During many iterations of the loop, Tal just writes about the events leading up to the loop. Anything that happens already happened some time ago. He states they want to find someone named “Bearskin” but Bearskin isn't introduced in the recaps until much later in the book so it's hard to care. Every loop begins with a raging hangover, which gets annoying well before Tal finds a solution. Late in the book Tal starts finding “today” problems and figuring out solutions, so likely the second book will be better.
Audiobook complaint: Two of the characters have the same voice. They're rarely talking in the same scene, but when they are it gets confusing.
Age of Victoria doesn't lean as hard into the Victorian era setting as I'd like but it's still good fun. The adventuring party is three very aggressive ladies and one man who must adapt to his role as a softboy healer. Everyone adapts to the GameLit Apocolypse really fast and while the “system” is influencing that change in personality and behavior, I wanted more of that inner conflict and societal conflict. Late in the book revisits those themes.
There is tons of fighting in this book, mostly against goblins. If you like a level grind this may be the book for you.
Content warnings: Brief scene of child abuse and an unpleasant scene involving a cat. Non-gory injuries and violence.
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.
Casual Farming has far more combat than I was expecting. Crabgrass and other weed monsters attack the farm constantly until Jason builds a fence. As the farm grows, it attracts more interesting monsters, but the first half of the book is lots of boring critters.
The first chapter is six years in the future, so we already know who Jason will eventually marry. That sucks the tension out of all romantic relationships and rivalries. That's a shame because only the first relationship chronologically has any chemistry and we know it's not going anywhere.
Things I like:
- Every chapter is one day and starts with the same wake up text. It cements the “farm game” feel.
- The nearby dungeon functions similarly to one in an adventurer based gamelit story but it's not Jason's career so the story doesn't focus on it too much.
Writing could really use an editor but is fine by gamelit/KU standards.
Apocalypse Parenting starts slow and low-stakes. The power goes out and there's a bunch of aggressive rodents in the yard. I promise it picks up. The anxiety ramps up slowly but steadily throughout the book.
Meghan is home with her three kids, aged 9, 6, and 3. Her husband was on a business trip when everything started so she has to figure this out on her own and hopefully with neighbors she barely knows. Apocalypse Parenting feels like an exercise in “How would YOU survive the system apocalypse?” Childrens toys are repurposed and barely-remembered facts from television shows are used to survive. I'm not sure readers outside North America will find it very relatable.
Through most of the story, All the Skills is less focused on the “deck building” aspect and more on the “skills”. 12-year-old Arthur gets his hands on a Legendary card that grants him unique access to a skill system. He starts out learning basic cooking skills and cooking is a surprisingly big part of the story throughout. Other skills he picks up are based around gambling and thievery, but with his card he develops into a jack of all trades.
He journeys from his destitute village with a trade caravan, encounters this world's monsters, and meets dragons. So many awesome dragons.
This book would be a great entry point to LitRPG for middle grade readers but doesn't fall into the middle grade tropes that might annoy an adult reader. It falls on the lighter end of the LitRPG/Gamelit system mechanics range.
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.
The author has a very clear and detailed idea of how magic, crafting, and dungeons work in his world and will explain it all in painstaking detail. Unfortunately there is very little actual plot to go with it.
We meet Sophia when she is still a human, with two club hands and a loving and protective faster. She learns crafting wherever they go but cannot craft anything herself due to her disability. And then she's dead, two hundred years have passed, she's a dungeon core, and who cares. I know time skips are a common dungeon core trope but I still hate it.
As a dungeon core, Sophia levels, expands, and figures out how to craft various things. That's 80% of the book. She has an exposition fairy and eventually an outcast from a nearby village joins up. They all have the same personality, same voice.
If you want a detailed dungeon leveling system, Crafter's Dungeon is great. But that's about it.
Content Warning: Fantasy racism
Unwritten Rules takes place mostly in a new virtual reality game, with a sprinkling of real world chapters. Kevin, badly crippled from a car accident, begins playing to suppliment his physical therapy sessions and gain a creative and social outlet. A bully player who managed to keep levels from the beta forms a guild to control the game world and Kevin ends up heading up the resistence.
Leveling isn't emphasized as much as many other LitRPGs. Improving skills and discovering new crafting recipes is highlighted, especially after Kevin descovers the Alchemist class.
I really liked the friend group that develops. Kevin is logged in far more than the real world friend who got him the game, so he spends time with various other players.
Content warnings: Player killing and bullying, giant spiders
Your enjoyment of King's League is going to depend heavily on how you feel about pop culture references in books. Like accidentally opening the pour side of the pepper container instead of sift, this book has too much for my taste and I found it hard to enjoy the otherwise fine book.
This is a VR MMO LitRPG but the real world still has some relevance. Dirk sells in-game items for real-world money and often has to choose between keeping gear to survive in-game or selling it to pay rent and buy groceries.
The King's League game sounds miserable. PKill encouraged, extremely harsh penalties for dying, and painfully slow progression. Dirk soon finds an overpowered god-helmet that increases his experience gains, so at least we don't have to suffer for long. He discovers corruption among the highest level players and most popular streamer and sets out to overthrow their tyrany. Hopefully not get evicted from his apartment.
The fight scenes are well written and varied. Dirk fights lots of different monster and player types, solo and occasionally in a group. Locations are varied and described well. There are only a few characters but they each have different voices.
Content warnings: Player killing and bullying, objectification of women, fat phobia, giant spiders, the R slur once. The closest the book gets to having a female character is one conversation 97% of the way through.
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 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.
Much better than expected! Granted, I was expecting something like one of those monster girl harem anime, so the bar was very low. But this is good actually!
Monster Core is about as horny as the average romance novel but none of the concent problems, plus the dungeon protagonist power fantasy. The protagonist is standard fare for this kind of book. He worked in marketing so he's good at manipulating others. Odd choice but okay.
The half troll lady is inexplicably hot and well spoken, despite coming from the talk-in-third-person uggo family. The other harem lady is more demure but is still down to party within an hour or so. There's also a non-sexy annoying sidekick character but he gets better.
Time to reset the “books since last sexual assault” timer! It's not as clear cut as in the first book, but it's very uncomfortable and I'd say it crosses the line. I believe this is the first book with the main couple having premarital sex.
The book starts out strong emotionally. Fran is married, his brother is attracted to her, and then husband dies and they both struggle with survivor's guilt. She deals with it, he runs away with it. And then Michael drops that part of his character because he wants to bang.
It's the middle Bridgerton son's turn and he wants to prove he's not just Number Two. In fact he is a big pile of Number Two - and a manipulative stalker to boot!
Sophie is the Cinderella in this retelling of the classic fairytale. She's the child of a mistress rather than a first wife, so the stepmother hatred and bitterness makes a lot more sense in this version. Inheritance law is used to good effect as well. Unfortunately the fairytale segment ends very quickly. I kept hoping to revisit the fairytale theme later but alas.
Content Warning: Bullying. Skip the prologue if you can't stand scenes of bullying. You won't miss anything vital, as everything it contains is referenced when pertinent.
Content Warning: Sexual assault. And we're supposed to forgive it.
The story starts as a “pretend we're dating” scheme as the blurb describes, but quickly switches to “he's damaged but I can fix him with love.” As Daphne repeatedly points out, she has three older brothers so she's used to the rough ways of men. Aka she's “not like other girls.” Simon doesn't talk much due to a stutter he's mostly conquered, but otherwise he's pretty standard. Daphne's mother is the best character. I'd enjoy a book from her perspective, manipulating her children into marriage.
Oh and the sex scenes are super vanilla.
The drugged up murderer gets a redemption arc. Poor girl gets a new contrived way to be shoehorned into rich people society. Hacker boy is trying to get into his dream college but that storyline doesn't really go anywhere. Really, the five main characters thing is now Leda, Avery, and other people watching Leda and Avery exist.
Avery and Atlus aren't blood related but they both apparently exude a pheromone that makes everyone they meet helplessly attracted to them. Maybe there's something in the water way up on the top floor. Anime must not exist in this world, because A and A keep obsessing over how “forbidden” their not-incestuous relationship is.
The new con-artist girl is fun, until she gets too close to the 1k floor pheromones and gets boring.
Pretty Little Liars or Gossip Girl but in a futuristic sky rise city. There are five perspective characters, three of which are nearly identical rich girls. It's exhausting to keep them straight. The prologue has an unnamed girl falling from the top floor. By the time the story reaches that point again, I was still getting characters mixed up enough that it took me a bit to be sure who it was.
A dumb future is better than this dystopian present, so I'll probably continue the series. But I'll probably wish I hadn't.
I'm pretty lenient when it comes to historic accuracy in romance novels but parts of this really got my ire up. The biggest offense: Lily has a white wedding dress squirrelled away in her trunk, years before the start of that trend.
The plot is very contemporary. Lily's ex is going to share a nude picture of her with the world in two weeks and it's going to ruin her. Meanwhile her new love interest, a sexy manbeast in a kilt, has so much baggage he's convinced he's not worthy of any woman.
This book isn't very well constructed. Some parts seem like they belonged to a different story, then were edited in. The time between The Rogue Not Taken and this book isn't consistent either. Lily's only skill is sewing, but it's barely relevant.
Two characters from The Season make appearances, which is nice I guess. The aliterative chapter titles continue, but with less enthusiasm, up until the last few chapters where they make way for puns on “ward”.
Every chapter title is an alliterative tabloid headline, which was annoying at first but soon reminded me of the narration in Gossip Girl. I heard it in Kristen Bell's voice despite listening to the audiobook.
Ignore the cover picture - Sophie is described as plump throughout, which is a wonderful change of pace. Personality-wise she's similar to Belle: likes books and wants to escape the status quo. King is the typical damaged but noble hearted type. Other than a “surprise kiss” there are no consent issues. There are a lot of annoying communication issues spurring the conflicts of the story along but I guess we can't get everything.