The Summary:
If you like LitRPG, snark and sexual innuendo, relatively recent pop culture references, and stories that show you the flipside of a narrative, I think this might be a good read/listen for you. There was one mechanic that I'm not a fan of, but I'll get into that in my actual review. The fact that I only have that negative to call out should indicate to you that I liked just about all the rest of this book, because that is the case.
Quick aside, thanks NetGalley for letting me read this, even after its publication! You can also read this review on my blog (https://hipkec.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/review-rule-of-cool/) or Goodreads, with a bonus Audience Participation option!
The Review:
Let's just get this fiddly bit out of the way first, shall we? Yes, this book is narrated by the awesome Felicia Day. I bring this up not because I'm a giant fanwoman of M. Day, but because she does have a large following and there's bound to be some people who only picked this book up because she narrated/performed it. Honestly, I'm not judging, I've done that for other narrators. I will judge those people though if they come in with "this book sucked, because i don't like these types of books, i just picked it up because Felicia Day!" which I don't really expect, but I just wanted to be clear. To be even more clear, this book, regardless of who narrated it, did not suck in my opinion.
As called out in the subtitle, this book is LitRPG. I've read other books in the LitRPG genre (Ascend Online and Spells, Swords, & Stealth, I'm looking at you) and I've liked them. This book has a lot of the things I've liked from those books, especially the Spells, Swords, & Stealth series by Drew Hayes because in both, the NPCs get a chance to change their role and the books are about how they deal with and do that. I'm not going to get into a compare and contrast because I'm just not. If you want that, lemme know and I'll see what I can do.
As I said in my summary, the one thing I didn't like a lot does come from the LitRPG-ness though and that is that until maybe more or less the halfway point of the book there is a lot of information about the character's rolls. As nerdy or geeky as I am, and I am, I only started playing D&D last year with probably quite a few other people for pandemic entertainment/socialization. In this case, that means I understood how the mechanics for some of the rolls, but for others I had no idea what was going on. For those with more nerd/geek cred than me (not hard to do in this arena), maybe that made sense. Regardless, it was interesting a few times. After that, it was just part that I kind of tuned out, until the "success or failure" decree was made. I liked that the actions taken depended on the success or failure of the rolls, but I really didn't need to know what kind of rolls they were, what the scores were, what the other character rolled, etc. I would've liked to just know that Raze's roll failed, so she got stabbed or that Raze's roll succeeded, so the other character got (insert action here).
Otherwise, I liked most everything about this book. I liked the characters, the humor was spot on, the plot, the whole shebang. I liked that the reviled NPC's got to rise up. I liked the teamwork and cooperation between the characters. I felt bad for the NPC's that their home had been invaded by basically jerks, to use as a starting point for their quest to become even bigger jerks. I liked the pop culture references that came from the Rift. You could say that those references were possibly an updated play on Ready Player One but, they didn't really play out that way.
