If you’ve listened to the Awaken Online series, you’ll enjoy this story and won’t miss the myriad references to the other books. If you haven’t read the other books, you can still enjoy this one, too — the references will just go over your head.
Again, the narrator is no Nick Podehl, Ray Porter, or RC Bray, but he does a decent enough job conveying Travis Bagwell’s outstanding story to the listener.
I feel like the plot is the result of the author sitting at a bar with his friend(s) sharing his success with Awaken Online, and his friend(s) start pitching this outrageous plot as a challenge for Bagwell to pull off — and He Does! I picture one of them pitching:
“Okay, your hero is Thanos in a black suit, carrying a chicken… and the more dangerous the situation, the luckier he gets.”
I still put Hellion as my #1 favorite in the Awaken Online series, but I love the message in Happy: self-improvement requires relentless training, and it must come with suffering, because you are both the sculptor and the stone.