Harmon Cooper crafts an almost wonderful coming of age story of a family on the brink of collapse due to life’s pressures that finds the dad and their two sons on a strange island mostly inhabited by senior citizens and lots of cats. There are a few oddities with this story as it relates to the litRPG genre in that while all of the people are sentient and sapient humans, they are all NPCs with, seemingly, only adults knowing the reality of this and kept from the children. The story is primarily focused on the dad’s two adolescent boys and their adventures in discovering the surprises and dangers as they explore the island.
I had two major issues with the book. One, the tendency to explore stats too often; especially since there was never any obvious correlation level gains to improved performance. The other was the use of an ID app that would allow the characters to view all of the cats details in a pop-up screen and since there were many cats on the island, including the cats read-outs often broke the flow of the story. Regrettably, the two combined gave the impression of the author word-stuffing to meat some book work count requirement.
Travis Baldree’s performance was very well done but couldn’t mask the faults in the novel.
I won’t be folling the series.