2.5
The good: Both Carl and Princess Donut are enjoyable characters, the conceit of the book is interesting and a bit novel, and the plot shows signs of being significantly deeper, in a good way, than it looks at first blush.
The bad: The humor here is set at about 6th-grade level; it’s juvenile and distracting rather than being amusing. Yo some extent, this seems intentional, since it’s a feature of the notional game show. The author could use more work on his basic English writing (hint: “conjunction” isn’t just a fancy synonym for “junction”). And for a book that revolves around a game show, the game system is far too loosely sketched in.
The reader, Jeff Hays, while generally decent, has an annoying tendency to drop the endings of sentences. This isn’t crippling, but it does draw attention away from the book.
There’s something here, but I’m not at all sure that there’s enough.