Continues to be great.

First let me start by saying when there are amazingly awesome, or amazingly bad reviews, I always go to the reviewers page to see how they reviewed other books. (If you didn’t know, you can click on reviewer’s names and check them out). When I read, “The author thinks we must be morons, etc etc,” I want to know what similar books we’ve listened to that I loved and find out where our differences are. Most times, when you see “Garbage MC,” “Moron,” “Honeypot,” “SO MUCH Drama,” etc in a review and go to that person’s page, you will find the exact same comments on other books they listened to, over and over and over again. If somebody knocks the lack of romance in a particular book, you will 99% of the time find out they have the same complaint time and time again, which helps me realize, “Okay. They’re really into romance. I can take it or leave it, so that won’t affect my decision to purchase this book.” I do the same when somebody heavily praises a book that has a bunch of poor reviews. Just an FYI for people who didn’t know it was possible to do that and are on the fence about a book they’re interested in, but because of it’s reviews, they’ve continued to shove it to the bottom of their wish list hoping for some good reviews to come along.

STORY: This book continues along the same path as all the previous books. Despite being “Team Jason” since reading everything in this universe (I like unlikely underdogs), I’m extremely impressed with the additional characters’ books, and how Travis weaves them all together. I entered this one with a complete distaste for Finn (again…Team Jason), but the author did a really good job of changing my perspective on a lot of the story, and somehow made me not so indifferent to the clear Trope that is the Fire Series of Finn and his Daughter. The pacing is good. The IRL is still applicable and well done, which seems to be very difficult for many authors to master. Usually you either want nothing but online, or the IRL is more interesting and you’re skipping forward to a Log Out. What I think is the most interesting thing Travis has done here, is to create a GoT scenario, interweaving stories, motives, and characters together in unity or battle. Rather than the “Side Stories” or “ .5 Books” being extra crap the author couldn’t fit into the main narrative, this whole thing is done in a way that even the individual characters’ stories/books are all part of the main story. You just don’t realize that until you get this far. It’s very well done. If you’re into this world, don’t pass on this. It’s all moving towards something spectacular I think, and I’d be happy to accommodate new avatars and characters, including their own books.

NARRATION: This is the one thing that brings my review down. I think I may have commented about this during the last character book of Finn. Stifel has an extremely limited range. There is the gruff male voice, the timid male voice, the confident female voice, and the timid female voice. It doesn’t matter if you add in some Arabic accents thrown in for the desert folk, or any accent at all really, because the voices are all the same. I had an issue with the final antagonist sounding the exact same as Finn in the aforementioned book, and it was the same here. At one point in time, Finn and Robert have a conversation during this book and it’s like listening to a crazy person talking and responding to themselves. It kills the immersion but you can’t skip it because important info is in that conversation. The more vital characters that are introduced in this series, the more they all start to blend together. There are even times during this story where I noticed Jason and Alex sound the exact same. I didn’t feel that way about his narration at first, but now 15 books in (or whatever the number is now), I’ve gotten to the point where it bothers me. Not enough to not continue by any means, but I just wonder what somebody like Nick Podehl (or insert an author you love with a huge range) could’ve done with what’s turning into a long epic series.

Bottom line: Not perfect by any means, but excellent interweaving of storylines, with an ability to emotionally attach you to specific characters based on their motives and what speaks to you, and a continuation of everything you loved in the previous books, while most likely not changing anything you may have wanted to see changed. I recommend the purchase, but like I said above, you can check my reviews and see where your preferences differ from mine to help you decide if you’d love this book or not.