When I first started this series I didn’t think I would enjoy it as much as I have. The characters are well written and very memorable, the world building is imaginative and fascinating, and the story is very engrossing.
This fourth book in the series is no exception, filled with surprise twists and lots of delightful, darkly humorous situations. If you’ve enjoyed Boxy’s adventures so far, you won’t find this book to be an exception.
I do have one niggling issue with the book though. I won’t give anything away, but there’s a role Boxy plays in this book that I just think it pulls off way too well. It shapeshifts into a certain role during the story and manages to pull it off absolutely flawlessly, which is very weird for a character who up until this point has had a lot of trouble handling social situations. The book even specifically says that even though Boxy’s gotten a lot better at handling social situations, it’s only been through extensive coaching, and that this coaching has only allowed it to handle the situations it’s been coached on. According to the book, Boxy still has absolutely no common sense when it comes to social situations, and if situations come up that it hasn’t been coached on Boxy still has a tendency to flounder.
However, there’s absolutely no evidence of that in Boxy’s performance. Lots of social encounters occur that Boxy couldn’t have possibly prepared for, yet it handles every single one of these flawlessly in character, with the full social common sense that you’d expect from a character who’s grown up dealing with social situations.
I have trouble even thinking of this character that Boxy plays as anything but a new character in its own right. I do appreciate the dissonance of having a fictional character that you develop feelings about which isn’t even “real” in the fictional universe you’re reading, that’s a very interesting way of messing with your readers’ minds. But it just doesn’t make sense in the context of the story, and that’s a flaw.
Overall though, it was a really good book, and the ending was absolutely perfect for the type of story this is!