First I have to mention that this book, where it takes place in Awaken Online, does not follow our heroes from the base series. Instead the book follows a new character with quite a tragic beginning. We find Fin, a retired A.I. programer, locked away from the world. His daughter brings Fin a copy of AO to help get him out of his funk, to which he reluctantly begins to play. Well, she pretty much strong arms him to play. Fin, like Jason from the base series, is chosen by a god to represent her in the world. Unfortunately for Fin, he starts the game trapped in a mage school/prison. Finn finds himself mixed up in a contest to find the regions new ruler.
I loved this book and could not wait to get back to it between breaks. Some of my favorite things about this book are Fin’s grumpy attitude mostly due to his adult daughters behavior, Fin creating Alfred approved mods for the game, and the spellcrafting system that we have not seen before in this series. Fin’s interactions with his daughter are usually some well placed comedy that had me laughing out loud at work. The mods are things that make Finn’s mage life simpler to understand since he doesn’t like anyone just instilling knowledge directly in his brain. The spellcrafting system is just so cool because Fin figures out that the incantations and hand gestures are like programing code. So Fin gets to work looking at the way he can manipulate the way spells work. This really had me interested in what Fin came up with next. There are also some very cool fight scenes here. If there is one thing I could change it would be the fact that the entire ingame events take place exclusively in the mage school-prison. I would have loved to see Fin or at least another character explore the surrounding area.
I feel that David Stifel does a MUCH better job in this book then in the base books. This is likely due to voicing adults instead of high schoolers that he makes sound alike. David does a great job differentiating the characters here.