I loved this intense continuation of the Dungeon Crawl game show with Carl, Princess Donut, Katia, and Mongo as they try to survive and get to the next level with the help of Mordecai. The story had the perfect balance of humor, love, real life issues, cuteness, danger, machinations, supernatural elements, surprises, and morality. This book continues exactly where the last book left off. Carl, Donut, Katia, and Mongo are now on level 5 of the Crawl – the Bubble – where they have to defeat the four castles in their quadrant in order to access the stairwell down. They are still very popular with the fans, Mordecai continues to assist them, Carl continues to come up with crazy dangerous plans, many of the characters from previous floors are back, and Donut continues to be Donut. I love the interplay 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” with the addition now of “I will break you.” 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, and laughs. There was once again some light ethical, moral, and philosophical undercurrents which added to the depth of the story but did not detract from it. 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 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.