Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsI am conflicted on this one
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 2, 2021
New Joe book! Yay! I love this series and have greatly enjoyed the main character and the hijinks he gets into. It always feels like a fun good time, with some very witty quips here and there and a strong feeling of growing power.
And this holds sorta true for this new story. We follow Joe into this new realm, where he has to join either dwarves or elves to continue growing his character. After he makes his choice, he gets on with getting on, but is constantly sidetracked by requirements for this new faction. All this ends up meaning that Joe just got a lot stronger in very significant ways, but the way the story flows and reads, it just doesn't feel like it.
It's almost like Dakota is on purpose distracting us at every gain to make it look smaller than it is, but the whole evolution of Joe's crafting based on the ending of the previous book is almost too powerful when you really look at it. But Joe is constantly being pulled one way or another and never gets to really DO anything with all this crafting setup. Maybe this obfuscation is deliberate to make the next book feel stronger, I don't know.
All I know is that I can go back to Raze or Ruthless or Regicide and re-read 2-3 different favorite sections/chapters but I am struggling to find 1 segment in this new story that I would want to do that with.
