The story throughout the beginning is great! Narration was on point and very well done. The additional background sound effects were additive to the story and in no way overdone. A+! Unfortunately, that’s about where the story falls short.
My mid 20’s were squandered from me by playing a lot of WoW and EQ2. I hated grinding and I definitely didn’t expect to listen in while the characters in the story were grinding. I also didn’t care for the very annoying ever repeated character stats. Stat reading is a long and arduous process that a lot of us don’t care to listen to for 5 minutes. We get it. Most of us can add and the constant reminders through VIC make it easy to remember. Reading the full character sheet at what seems like every chapter is overkill. On the contrary, I did like it at the end of the book. It showed his progression.
The story line just wasn’t there through the book. The beginning was well laid out and prepared. Once he got to the city, it all fell apart. So many story pieces were left hanging. Character development stopped being a prominent process and it became more of “Green Side Story – Tika finds her love far away and her heart wrenches between being a bread winner and a pregnant mother while the love of her life leaves to make it big in the big city.” How apropos. I wanted them to break out in dance around the village. Hey we did get knife fights though!
Besides the gaudy love story, the rest of the story was flat predictable and it seemed like Shemer ran into a deadline wall. Nothing lead up to the ending. It just happened. Just a terribly paced and unimaginative battle dragging you to the most blase’, 13yo choose-your-own adventure Hardy Boys ending ever. Lemme guess, there’s going to be another book. My expectations are not great.