Jurassic Park meets the world of table top role playing games? Sign me up!

This had a lot going for it that I loved. The world building of the island was so much fun. And I was right along with Addie as she wanted to wander off and explore the dragons and the unicorns. As a big fan of the world of fantasy and mythology, I was enraptured by this amalgamation of the stories I know and love so well. Was every little name drop and reference clear fan service? Yes, Did I still smile every time one popped up? Also yes.

And the pacing felt pretty good. There was enough drive to keep things going, but there were occasional moments of breathing room so everything didn't feel too rushed.

But I ended up being really disappointed by the ending. We got isolated from a lot of the characters I really became fond of, and Addie seemed to fall prey to her ex's manipulations in a way that I had wanted her to have moved past. And then sleeping with him after getting staggeringly drunk made me really uncomfortable.

Apart from the ending, I really enjoyed this story. It was written with the same level of love for the world of the fantastic that I have.

Thank you to NetGalley and Mariner Books for this arc.

In a love letter to the fantasy and sci-fi community, Vaughn (Kitty Norville series) geeks out in this Westworld-meets-Lord of the Rings adventure. Addie, a skittish English Professor, with a traumatic background, is surprised when she’s approached by “tech guru” Harris Lang to help with his latest project gone awry. Insula Mirabilis, a fantasy themed island, has been hijacked by Lang’s design team including Dom, Addie’s ex, and the real reason she’s there. Addie is mesmerized by all her favorite stories come-to-life, but the inevitable violence threatens the magic in which she has sought comfort. Gamers will share Addie’s enthusiasm for the journey’s Dungeons & Dragons-like arc, but the overall story lacks depth, and, instead of developing secondary characters, Vaughn devotes much of the story to fantasy and sci-fi references, “Oh my God, you put Ravenclaws and Slytherins in charge—that’s the problem with this place!” Addie, however, is an endearing, relatable character with whom readers will sympathize. This guilty pleasure will interest readers who’ve come to love Vaughn’s amusing writing style and strong female protagonists. (Review for Booklist)

Oh my goodness. This book was a fun ride. I'm not usually into silliness in my books but this just worked for me. I was expecting a romance but this was all about how someone's obsession can help them overcome trauma. The sheer nerdiness of this book had me giggling. The trauma had me connecting and the plot was hella fun. It does take a dark turn in the end but that just made me like the book even more. I do believe this book sets out to be fun, adventurous and a pretty good story. It is successful in each.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

When I received this I wanted to love it more than I did. It was a great concept but I felt it wasn’t executed as well as I would have hoped. The pacing was slow in some parts And extremely fast in others.

Solid 3.5
This was a D&D campaign as a book. I recently started playing D&D, so it was a lot of fun. I especially liked that the smart girl knew more than the muscle. At times the story was a little much and the characters a little inconsistent, but the imagination and the world building were excellent.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Mariner Books for granting me access to an early copy of this book*

DNF at 50%

This was a book I was actually looking forward to. I love the cover and the premise of an island where technology is used make fantastical things a reality has gone rogue sounds so fun. While this book did deliver on paper the melding of science fiction and fantasy, there was a noticeable lack of entertainment from this story, and I think that really comes from the fact that everything felt dry and flat. From the characters to the plot and even this amazing island, all of this somehow came across as boring. It felt more like each beat was checking off a To-Do list rather than being a natural progression of things. I literally couldn't tell you anything about the characters, other than I think there was one over the top militaristic guy but that's it. It wasn't until after I quit this book that I realized it really falls under the LitRPG sub genre, which is a genre I have no interest in for exactly this reason (and a few others), everything was stale and underdeveloped. Since I don't read LitRPG I cannot say how this book compares to others of that type, but based off the average ratings on Goodreads (which while useful are not the end all or be all of b ook evaluations) this does not seem to be one of the better regarded ones. For anyone curious, I would seek out reviews by people who are better acquainted with LitRPG.

Tenía pendiente desde hace tiempo Questland de Carrie Vaughn, que promete diversión sin complicaciones en la enésima iteración de la idea de visitar un parque temático que se ha ido de madre, aunque esta vez cambiemos los dinosaurios por dragones, imagino que ya sabéis por dónde voy.


La protagonista de la historia es la doctora en literatura Addie Cox, superviviente de un tiroteo en el instituto y expareja de uno de los diseñadores principales de Insula Mirabilis, un resort turístico creado bajo el auspicio de un millonario megalomaníaco que aspira a ofertar a los interesados una aventura del rol medieval en vivo. Pero antes de ponerla en funcionamiento, sucede algo que la pone en cuarentena del mundo y se decide mandar a un equipo de mercenarios a investigar, “ayudados” (es un decir) por la doctora Cox, a la que se le presupone un gran conocimiento de la fantasía.

La premisa es muy tonta, pero al menos me esperaba que me divirtiera. Por desgracia no ha sido así, porque Questland es una acumulación de lugares comunes que a lo mejor le gusta a quien se entretenga en investigar todas las referencias, pero que a mí en ningún momento ha llegado a interesarme ni mucho menos engancharme (¡arañas!, ¡animales antropomórficos!, ¡elfos con orejitas puntiagudas!, ¡misiones secundarias!, ¡castillos!…). Que el primer reto sea descifrar el enigma de la esfinge y que los mercenarios reverencien casi a la doctora por saber la respuesta… pues no sé, no dice mucho sobre la capacidad del equipo enviado.

Además, las rencillas internas entre los habitantes de Insula Mirabilis son de lo más banal e infantil y la motivación de los actos de cada uno es, directamente, pueril. Quizá esta incursión de Vaughn en el mundo del LitRPG sea una oportunidad de escapismo para otros lectores, pero para mí es un experimento fallido, que no puedo recomendar para nada.

So. Much. Nerdy. Goodness. If you’re a nerd of any kind, you will appreciate this book. I had so much fun with it. For some reason, when I read the blurb, I was thinking virtual reality gone wrong, but it’s not. It’s got a very Jurassic Park feel, but for gamers, which I really appreciate. Like Jurassic Park, things go wrong . . . but also, I’d love to see more books in this series. I mean, hey, JP made it work, right? I 100% absolutely want to revisit this island!

DNF - I've picked up and put down this book several times and I just can't get into it. I like the basic premise but I didn't care for the characters much at all.

DNF - Did not finish. I did not connect with the writing style or plot and will not be finishing this title. Thank you, NetGalley and Publisher for the early copy!

Dr. Addie Cox is a literature professor - very happy with her job and the assumption that she is making a mark on impressionable young minds. It's a comfortable life and she's happy with it. Then her status quo changes when Harris Lang, a billionaire tech genius offers her a job.

Lang owns an island off the western coast of the United States. His intention was to create a high-tech fantasy resort with unicorns and dragons and magic of all sorts. But one as real as possible, not just simple animatronics like many theme parks.

There's been one problem with Lang's plan ... one of his lead designers has gone rogue and has taken over the island and put in place a powerful defensive system. A Coast Guard ship that tried to pass through the invisible barrier was destroyed with all hands lost. Now, Addie is to join a highly trained military attack squad to infiltrate the island and wrench control back for Lang.

Why Addie? Well, for starters she's a Dungeons & Dragons fan and in the course of her teaching she teaches a lot of pop-culture and geek-culture - the sorts of things one might run into on an island of this sort. The other reason is that the designer who's taken over is Dominic Brand, Adie's ex-boyfriend.

I really wanted to read this because of how much I enjoyed the last two books that I read by Carrie Vaughn - Bannerless and The Wild Dead. I could tell from the description that this wasn't likely to be set in the same universe, but any book by Carrie Vaughn is worth reading.

For the most part, the book reads just like what it appears to be ... a D&D adventure. What's different about this is that it makes no bones about it. In fact, it is played up. Addie jokes about it being a D&D adventure and her role in it ("I'm not the wizard. I'm the Bard."). She is the ne who often has to figure out the answers to the clues around them, and she has to step in and stop the fighters from just killing everything in front of them.

The island is set up like a D&D game, so this all makes sense, and it's kind of fun to see this game, inside a story, which is set up like a game.

Addie's joining this excursion is a little bit of a stretch (really ... there was nobody better qualified?) and while she talks about slowing down the squad, and they talk about her (when they think she isn't listening) slowing them down, she of course rises to the occasion and proves herself - again and again. In this sense it's a bit of a Mary Sue story.

Categorizing this book is a challenge. It's an adventure story, but set in a false fantasy world. All the fantasy elements are artificial, no matter how 'real' they appear. Even one of the main characters has their ears cosmetically changed so that they are pointed elf ears - they're real, but fake. So is this a fantasy? No, and yes. Does it matter? Only in the sense that while this is set up like a thrilling adventure where the main characters could be killed at any moment, it reads like a light-hearted fantasy. No amount of explaining how dangerous it all is, or even deaths among the characters actually mkes it feel dangerous. Not once did I worry about how this was going to end.

The characters are nicely established and the overall plot works well and author Carrie Vaughn's writing is just really nice and straightforward. I wanted something a little tougher, something with some 'grit' (maybe because of the previous books I've read by her?) but I did enjoy this. This is a perfect book for an airport read or beach read.

Looking for a good book? Questland by Carrie Vaughn is a D&D style adventure that takes you to a remote island that has been converted to a D&D style theme park and a group will have to work together to defeat the evil currently ruling the island. Fans of the genre will love this. Geeks will geek out.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Wow, I had a great time with this book! I'd recommend to any D&D player, board game lover, or nerd culture aficionado. This was packed with so many great game and lore references and I had a blast recognizing and appreciating each one of them (although I'm sure I missed a few as well).
The idea of this book is what got me. I love the Jurassic-Park-meets-D&D-meets-Westworld vibe. I also loved the PTSD representation with the main character; she was absolutely my favorite character in the novel. She felt real, and flawed, and complex, and layered, and clearly such an expert in her field but also had a distinct personality underneath it all.
The plot, though, I felt was lackluster. It wasn't memorable, and I don't think it brought anything new to the adventure genre (but I suppose maybe that was the point, to be simply a celebration of the genre?). They assembled a crew, and scene by scene fought the bad guys and bested the puzzles as each time the stakes grew steeper and the battles/challenges more difficult. It read like a D&D campaign. But... I would have rather just played D&D to get that experience. Reading it felt a bit choppy and formulaic, and the ending was rather anticlimactic.
Overall I would absolutely be interested in reading more from Carrie Vaughn, and I'm also looking forward to more books with gaming as a central theme in the writing.

This was a very wild ride and I kinda liked it but also got very annoyed at parts of it, because sometimes its nerdy references were just over the top and felt really forced.

I started reading this book and found that it was not for me. I didn't want to review a book that I didn't finish.

Reviewed in exchange for requested eARC at NetGalley, my thanks and I apologize on the delay!

I think Professor Adrienne "Addie" Cox may be a nod to Ariadne the bride of Theseus who Dionysus made his wife and a half sister to the Minotaur? If not, oh well!

I was a bit sad over how things end with Rucker - punk soldier trying to be a better student - who Addie seemed closest to of the mercenaries hired by Lang.

We don't get to know much about Wendell, Almonte, or Torres. Torres is the mercenary team leader and seems to take well to following Addie and calling Professor after her as she has a bad habit of wondering off.

Addie does have her work cut out for her from the start. Insula Mirabilis is divided between Lang's three team leaders "King" Arthur, "Empress" Tess, and " King" Dominic in the questlands of Sword, Shield, Arrow. They've taken to living as Robin Hood's merry folk, dwarves riding "wargs" or elves riding unicorns. A fantasy that's killed and endangered people and the off switch is Tor Camylot, a boss level castle and on Insula Mirabilis "here be dragons" is a promise.

I am a little hopeful on a sequel Addie jokes about with her mercenary team towards the end. I too would like to see them playing on a D&D map with a DM.

A decent, but predictable LitRPG. I loved all the nerdy references, but it seemed forced at times, and really fell short of expectations.

Unfortunately I didn't manage to get to it soon enough, real life being in the middle.
Getting back to it after months, re-reading the plot and the reviews that have been posted on GoodReads in the meantime, I realized it was not what I was looking for.
Still, recommended to any sci-fi and fantasy fan, with a special recommendation to fan of Tolkien and D&D.

When billionaire tech genius Harris Lang decided to prove the old saying about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic his team built something truly amazing. Insula Mirabilis is everything a fantasy nerd could want, with puzzles and questing and legendary creatures. Or at least, it will be provided someone can put a stop to the managerial mutiny before the army steps in. For that, Lang calls in a team of mercenaries and Professor Addison Cox, a literature professor and expert in the tropes of fantasy games. An expert, and Lang’s secret weapon against one of the mutineers, her former fiancé, chief designer Dominic Brand. Addie will need to keep a sharp eye out and lean on years of experience with games like Insula Mirabilis is meant to offer if she wants to end the mutiny before the whole island is lost to chaos.

Questland is a book I picked up as much because of author Carrie Vaughn as for the idea of a literature professor and a group of mercenaries having to retake a fantasy theme park island from the people who designed it. I do admit, I love that concept though. I find that I am having something of a hard time talking about how I feel about it though, so this might ramble a bit.

The entire concept of Insula Mirabilis is one that I would love to see explored further. Here is this island theme park with a full fantasy game quest set up across three different realms. It has aspects that very clearly pulled from familiar pop culture, something that Addie noted and that it felt like she came close to digging into. This is a fantasy theme park with actual unicorns and a sphinx and magic rings, and going into more of it would have been complete fan service and broken away from the plot completely but I find that that does not leave me wanting to know more any less for knowing it. I found myself wanting to dig into where everything came from and how things were implemented. It makes Insula Mirabilis the kind of place I want to visit even as Addie notes that seeing the behind the scenes stuff takes something out of it for her.

I found myself with mixed feelings while reading Questland. On the one hand, I wanted to see more, to have things slow down a bit and for more random encounters to happen to show off what was being built on the island and more of each area. On the other hand, It could not have slowed down much due to the short timeline the characters have to get everything solved before the military moves in, that pace has to be kept up so that the threat of failure and something worse happening to the mutineers is still looming. I think I would have also liked to have seen more build up to some of the stuff seen in the climax, of the sort of four dimensional chess game going on between Harris Lang and Dominic Brand. Which is funny, because I could have also dealt with less of Brand.

Vaughn is an author I keep coming back to again and again because I like her writing, and a big part of that ongoing enjoyment is her characters. Addie was a blend of clever and overly excitable that left me wanting to invite her to join my Friday night game and shake her by turns. The mercenaries that she is working with to try and stop the mutiny are solid side characters, with clear personalities and their own reactions to both the setting and Addie. Torres especially, since he is the lead mercenary, but also a special note to Almonte and Rucker. Despite them being purposely separate from the fantasy of Insula Mirabilis, I found myself enjoying them. The differences in the three mutineers and the sections of the island they had chosen for themselves had some fun ideas that I, again, mostly wish I had seen more of. Dominic Brand is the exception to this. Vaughn does a fantastic job with characters who are just the wrong side of pushy and over confident, the ones who take that to a creepy worrisome place, and Dominic sits square in that character type.

Questland is very much a standalone title, but I still found myself hoping for more of it somewhere later on. I enjoyed the setting and the characters and have no real complaints about it beyond some weirdness at the climax of the story that I wish had been a bit better set up. For me, it more than earns a four out of five. Definitely give it a read if you get the chance.

Questland was such a fun book to read! Fans of adventure and lovers of D&D everywhere should really try to get their hands on a copy. The world building is super intriguing - like Dungeons and Dragons meets West World. The setting and characters coupled with the fact that the book isn't super thick, will have you flipping pages to the end in no time. Highly recommend!