I loved this continuation of the Dungeon Crawl game show with Carl, Princess Donut, and Mongo as they try to survive and get to the next level. Despite the similarities between the books, each storyline has been fresh and engaging and the characters grow and change with their experiences. This level had a great balance of humor, love, real life issues, cuteness, danger, machinations, supernatural elements, surprises, death, hard choices, and morality. This book continues exactly where the last book left off. Carl, Donut, and Mongo are now on level 8 of the Crawl after level 7 was broken by Prepotente before it was played. In this level, the crawlers are once again separated into zones and have to fight with battle card decks. Donut and Carl continue to be popular with the fans and Mordecai continues to assist them. Carl continues to come up with crazy dangerous plans and crawlers from previous floors are back. We get more of the NPC and crawler backstories and a better understanding of the history of the dungeon. Crawlers continue to die including some who are major characters. And of course, Donut continues to be Donut. I still love the interplay and the connection between Carl and Princess Donut and that Carl’s character is a sweet, snarky, messy, lucky, sarcastic, kind of dumb, angry, and awkward man who regularly screws up which just makes him a very likeable and relatable hero. I especially love his mantra of “you will not break me. I will break you” and his continual sneaky subversive efforts. The story includes what you’d expect from this genre – fighting, dangerous situations, supernatural creatures, evil entities, henchmen, loyal friends, tragic back stories, mystical coincidences, snark, plot twists, death, and laughs. There was once again some light ethical, moral, and philosophical undercurrents which added to the depth of the story. I will definitely keep reading the series to see what the next levels are like and what happens with Carl and Princess Donut and to see what Carl’s continued plans are to mess up the game.
Jeff Hays did a phenomenal job narrating the story and characters into life with enough change of inflection, tone and cadence to voice multiple characters quite convincingly. This was one of the best narrations I have ever heard. Reading the story was great but listening to it raised the enjoyment to a whole other level.