Wren
A white knight of the realm isn't supposed to be vacationing in the black sorcerer's castle.
For at least half of the book, probably even closer to 3/4 of the book, this was honestly such good fun. Sure, the prose was sometimes clunky, with everyone’s body parts acting independently way too often (you can’t convince me “her eyes bounced between them” isn’t a terrifying mental image, lol) and other assorted small troubles. But the fun and funny banter made up for it. The characters were entertaining, and I liked how they alternated between leaning into the tropes they were built around and slightly subverting them. The world, while clearly a deliberately generic D&D-ish fare, presented some fun monsters to fight and challenges to overcome. The audiobook narrator did a great job conveying the tongue-in-cheek irreverence of it all. Genuinely, it was an excellent bedtime story.
I also really appreciated the progression of the romance, how it was sorta insta-love on Tan’s side, but also slow-burn because Devan needed time to start considering the idea (and then there’s that later plot development that explains how the “insta” part was actually less “insta” than one might think, I enjoyed that one too). I was glad to see Devan presented as demisexual as explicitly as possible without mentioning the word—yay for repping the identities from under the ace umbrella! In general, I think these two guys complimented each other so well, at least for the huge part of the book while Tan remained less evil and more chaotically neutral with such a staunch commitment to chaos that everyone couldn’t help but call him a villain, and Devan was gradually progressing from lawful good to neutral good as he leaned into the spirit of the law versus the letter.
What changed for me late in the book, I think, was when they stopped focusing on having adventures and relationship developments and switched to organizing a revolution against the titular princess. On one hand, I’m all for dismounting the system instead of putting out small fires constantly. On the other hand, I didn’t like how flat the princess’s character was, or rather, how she was more prop than character. Everyone was already fed up with her and couldn’t wait to switch to a different side, and so it wasn’t clear how she’d maintained power and influence for so long. Especially given that there was a king, too, and now and then he acted like he was the actual ruler, so why was it the princess who made all the decisions, terrorized the citizens, etc? How was this Kingdom even working? This story in general is too humor-focused to be very nuanced, true, but something about how this entire part was handled grated me a lot. Perhaps it would’ve been easier to stomach without the pages and pages of justification about how Devan murdering the princess actually made him a good character, or without Tan fully turning from the kind of evil sorcerer people feel safe siccing beginner adventurers on because he’d never really hurt them to someone who’s like “Yay! Murder spree!”
A white knight of the realm isn't supposed to be vacationing in the black sorcerer's castle.
For at least half of the book, probably even closer to 3/4 of the book, this was honestly such good fun. Sure, the prose was sometimes clunky, with everyone’s body parts acting independently way too often (you can’t convince me “her eyes bounced between them” isn’t a terrifying mental image, lol) and other assorted small troubles. But the fun and funny banter made up for it. The characters were entertaining, and I liked how they alternated between leaning into the tropes they were built around and slightly subverting them. The world, while clearly a deliberately generic D&D-ish fare, presented some fun monsters to fight and challenges to overcome. The audiobook narrator did a great job conveying the tongue-in-cheek irreverence of it all. Genuinely, it was an excellent bedtime story.
I also really appreciated the progression of the romance, how it was sorta insta-love on Tan’s side, but also slow-burn because Devan needed time to start considering the idea (and then there’s that later plot development that explains how the “insta” part was actually less “insta” than one might think, I enjoyed that one too). I was glad to see Devan presented as demisexual as explicitly as possible without mentioning the word—yay for repping the identities from under the ace umbrella! In general, I think these two guys complimented each other so well, at least for the huge part of the book while Tan remained less evil and more chaotically neutral with such a staunch commitment to chaos that everyone couldn’t help but call him a villain, and Devan was gradually progressing from lawful good to neutral good as he leaned into the spirit of the law versus the letter.
What changed for me late in the book, I think, was when they stopped focusing on having adventures and relationship developments and switched to organizing a revolution against the titular princess. On one hand, I’m all for dismounting the system instead of putting out small fires constantly. On the other hand, I didn’t like how flat the princess’s character was, or rather, how she was more prop than character. Everyone was already fed up with her and couldn’t wait to switch to a different side, and so it wasn’t clear how she’d maintained power and influence for so long. Especially given that there was a king, too, and now and then he acted like he was the actual ruler, so why was it the princess who made all the decisions, terrorized the citizens, etc? How was this Kingdom even working? This story in general is too humor-focused to be very nuanced, true, but something about how this entire part was handled grated me a lot. Perhaps it would’ve been easier to stomach without the pages and pages of justification about how Devan murdering the princess actually made him a good character, or without Tan fully turning from the kind of evil sorcerer people feel safe siccing beginner adventurers on because he’d never really hurt them to someone who’s like “Yay! Murder spree!”