This book was so fun! It's kind of like Jurassic Park, but make it fantasy. I absolutely loved this premise and really enjoyed all of the fun, nerdy references throughout! We get to see creatures like unicorns, dragons, sphinx, wargs, and more. There are many references to the Lord of the Rings (which I love) and D&D! This felt like such a fun thought exercise, and I'd love to actually be able to go there...though perhaps not in its current state!

I found the pacing was consistently good throughout the book, and it certainly kept me interested the entire time. I really wanted to learn more about this island and just what exactly had happened. We also have some cool technology that I enjoyed!

In terms of the characters, I liked Addie overall. She has PTSD (there was a school shooting when she was younger), so we see how she tries to cope with this and how this just generally affects her. This seemed pretty realistic to me. I also liked how some members of this mercenary team are respectful of her background and mindful as to how situations might negatively affect her. I thought Addie was extremely relatable in terms of her love and respect for the island! I also appreciated how she tries to solve things without violence. We learn fairly early on that her ex is one of the engineers on this project, and I thought she was very justified in her decision to break things off with this relationship.

Overall, I had a blast with this book and would definitely recommend it!

I received a copy of this for review from the publisher via NetGalley - thank you! All opinions are my own.

My video review can be seen on my channel (around minutes 19:20-22:51 of this video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqKqrU9LmyY

LARPing meets D&D all in one novel. I personally won’t compare it to another novel, but it’s a lot of fun and a quick read at the at too!!

This is an absolute nerdfest – a theme park geared towards fantasy and DnD where everything is just a little too real. The descriptions of this fantasy island never slow the speed of the story which is a fun and fast paced romp with Tolkienesque magical creatures. I had an absolure blast reading this.

This book isn't exactly my cup of tea, but I'm a big fan of the author, and that makes all the difference. This is going to be like gold for its intended audience. It's Ready Player One with the benefit of a story and a competent author who has more to say than "remember this? What about THIS?" It's an adventure inside a world built on nostalgia, and I feel people who were let down by Ready Player Two will finally get what they were looking for here.

I ended up DNFing this book like 30% of the way through because I really didn't like the writing style. The opening with the conversation about Pokemon and Moby Dick did not make our main character seem likable, and that trend continued through as much as I read.

Unicorns. Dragons. Elves. These are a few of my favourite things. I love fantasy and literature and all those things rolled into one so Questland, about a literature professor sent on a quest to take back a fantasy island seemed like an actual dream.

It wasn't quite what I was expecting: Questland was neither a serious "what if" story exploring the ramifications of AI creatures and the boundaries of danger for tourists (I'm looking at you Jurassic Park) or a fun, lighthearted adventure. I'm not sure it knew exactly what it wanted to be and it got a bit muddled. 

It handled gun-related PTSD of a main character in a sensitive way, which I liked, and I didn't dislike it overall. It just didn't wow me. I would recommend it to anyone who likes easter eggs in stories (there are tonnes of literature and gaming references) and anyone looking to explore a more lighthearted speculative fiction featuring AI.

Questland
By Carrie Vaughn

The blurb for this story really caught my attention. Think “Westworld' and ‘Jurassic Park’, but instead of dinosaurs, you have a mythologically inspired island filled with creatures made out of life like technology, with quests based along the lines of ‘World of WarCraft’ and ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ with a little ‘Lord of the Ring’, among others, tossed in.

I loved ‘Ready Player One’, so I dove right into this book but was disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, it was good, creative, and interesting, but there was something missing. The main character, while she was interesting and had an issue that made her a bad choice, but because of her relationship with one of the island’s creators, she was ‘bait’, but she felt flat, as did the other characters. There just wasn’t a whole lot that made me really care about them. 

Now the island, the idea of it, I connected with and would love to go on an adventure there, even if it was just to sit out and chill with the unicorns and dragons.

It wasn't overly graphic, but the main character’s past, (witness to a school shooting), would be very sensitive for some readers and there is some violence on the island, so I would say this book would be okay for those 16 and over, just as long as they aren't overly sensitive to the mentioned content. It’s not overly detailed, but it’s there.

Overall it was a good story, but as I said, it felt a little flat.

Three stars.

A fabulous geek fest that combines the best fantasy genres with action/adventure and a bit of psychological thriller thrown in for good measure. The writing is fast-paced and keeps the story moving at a good clip, although there are great descriptions of scenery when it’s important.

Received from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The setting for this novel is a kind of updated Dream Park - an immersive LARPing environment constructed with sufficiently advanced technology (an unspecified number of years into the future) that it's at least difficult to distinguish from magic. Except an energy barrier has gone up and isolated the island where Questland is being developed by a corporation headed by the usual billionaire narcissist, and said narcissist has hired a team to go in and get it back for him.

Cue the trope of "very civilian female expert is called in to consult on a matter that's under military or paramilitary jurisdiction and is super secret, and she has to deal with the militariness of it all". (Really, it's a trope, though usually the matter under investigation is first contact, in my previous experience.) In this case, there are a couple of extra layers: the expert, as the survivor of a school shooting where her boyfriend and her best friend were killed in front of her, suffers from PTSD and is not at all comfortable around the military; and her expertise is not only as a comparative-lit professor who is also deeply into the kind of nerdy pursuits that form the basis of Questworld, but as the ex-girlfriend of the prime suspect for the activator of the barrier: the head of the design team.

Ironically enough, the problems I had with this one were all about suspension of disbelief. I didn't believe in the conveniently uninhabited, idyllic island some distance off the west coast of the US. I didn't believe that the ex-boyfriend believed he would somehow be able to get legal ownership of it for the developers. I didn't believe that after five months of the island being isolated, no friends or relatives on the mainland had raised any kind of public fuss, or that the supplies were holding out so well, or that the people on the island weren't bothered by the isolation, or that the US government hadn't done more to get in there - especially since a ten-person Coast Guard crew had been killed trying to breach the barrier - or that nobody had leaked anything to the media. I didn't believe that a designer (not an engineer) could come up with the energy barrier and construct it, apparently without the help of the engineering team, in the first place, or that there would be enough power to sustain it. I didn't initially believe that three project managers, after five months, hadn't apparently made any progress in solving the problem of accessing the central system, but then I thought about project managers I've known and believed it after all. I didn't, however, believe in the central system, which none of the people who had set up the entire island seemed to really understand or be in control of. It was as if the true antagonist was a system that everyone had contributed to but nobody understood or controlled, except maybe the tech billionaire; and then I wondered if this was a callback to the first scene, and the lit prof's student going on about rampant capitalism.

So anything in the physical and technical setup I pretty much didn't believe. What I did believe was the emotional and personal setup, which is where the book was strong. The post-traumatic professor, the attitude of the military people (who clearly had respect for what she was dealing with and how she was dealing with it, even if she wasn't aware of that respect), the self-absorbed and condescending ex, the ineffectual project manager, the angry engineer who was in it for the sense of wonder - all of these I believed. There was a strong human story being told, but for me, it didn't quite come completely together, not only because of my struggles to suspend belief about the setup and the setting, but also in that it felt just a little bit undercooked. There were the elements of an even stronger, and indeed very powerful, story, but whether from inadequate on-page reflection, a lack of clarity, or not enough development, they didn't add up to as much as they might have.

I find this author's books a mixed bag. When she's good, she's amazing, but when she's a bit off her game - and, for me, this is one of those books - it's disappointing, because I know she's capable of more. There was a lot of potential here that I felt remained unrealized.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.