That’s the best way I can describe this latest installment of AO. Bagwell abandons the main things I enjoyed about this series and wholeheartedly embraces the things that most put me off about it.
The thing I have liked most throughout this series is the sense of adventure and character development/progress that the author has woven through both worlds. The thing that makes you really feel like you’re taking a walk through another world and that anything might happen around the next corner.
The aspect that has threatened to put me off of this series throughout every book has been the overwrought hand-wringing and overdone, moral indecision that Bagwell beats away on like highest hippie in the drum circle… I don’t mind this aspect when it’s woven into the story subtly enough that you don’t want to just slap the character/author and start looking through your wishlist for another book on Audible.
Unfortunately, in spite of this book being 20+ hours long it feels like most of it is filled with a bunch of YA moaning a la… “Should I do the thing thing that I know I’m going to end up doing no matter what?” and, “Even though I had no choice or wasn’t even the one responsible for the situation, I just have to obsess over and over about how guilty I feel about the thing that I in fact was not responsible for but for which I irrationally insist on taking responsibility!” and on and on.
There is very little adventure here. Everything is unnecessarily drawn out and picked over until you just feel like you’re on edge and stressing along with the characters, but you don’t actually care about the outcome… for about 19 out of the 20 hours. Also, the bouncing from character to character device doesn’t have the same impact of dropping in big plot turns and “oh sh!t!, no he didn’t” information reveals. In spite of there being a big question about the nature of the world running through the whole installment, this book lacks the advancement of our knowledge of the world and the deeper facets of the workings of both the AI in the real world and the gods/power players in the online one.
In fact I feel like this whole book could have been condensed down to one of the x.5 side novellas and still have been a bit short on plot/character advancement.
That said, the book is (as always) well written and well edited. The narrator does the same fairly good job he’s done all along. However, I find the quirks of his own personal accent endlessly annoying and frequently jarring, but they’re no more or less present than in the rest of the series. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about here then just pay attention to how he pronounces the word “popcorn” throughout these books and try to tell me that it doesn’t bother you too).
In the end, I just hope this is a temporary dip in Bagwell’s otherwise engrossing and imaginative story telling, and that the next books get back on track with the immersive and exciting adventures and character development.