i thoroughly enjoyed book one of this series, and two was also pretty good. 3 was okay. Which brings us further down this steep slide to book 4.
(very Minor spoilers from the first 10 minutes of the book to follow)
book 4 has the elements of a great story – Calamity Gods have fused together this world of Pandora/Pangea/Pangolin w/e; with all the… destoryed? Monster? dying? worlds? i don’t know,t hey kind of skip over the science of that part. REGARDLESS, huge chunks of the MCs world were destroyed and monster dens put in there place, in some world-spanning thunderdome scenario, meanwhile the Calamitys are flying around making the Corruption much worse, and there may be a conspiracy to uncover.
…however, most of that can be handled pretty easily with our HUGE band of completely OP adventurers or through the power of talking; so lets, instead focus on: awkward surprise romances, barf, an extremely gross eating contest, barf, Chester being bullied for half the book for doing EXACTLY WHAT DAMON TOLD HIM TO, farts, Chester being bullied for something he had no control over (infection), barf, the most annoying Karen Calamity, farts, and … more barf. (yes, i know Chester can also be a bully, but this was OTT)
To make it worse… Chester isn’t even very funny in this book. maybe he was depressed because his “friend” turned into a stuck up bully as soon as he got some “kiss-kiss”., and he was dealing with the side-effects of winning the “battle” that Damon signed him up for… but his usual mostly-light-hearted-stranger-in-a-strange-world chaos was just… replaced with farts and barfing.
one of my favorite parts of this story was Damon’s affectionate big brother attitude to Chester’s Chaos-demon little brother. and that was almost entirely missing.
Finally, While i dont like Melina; i am concerned about her mental health. she went from foaming-at-the-mouth revenge rage-demon, to “i’m so happy now that we killed that guy. all my problems are solved, and i’m ready to move on.” these mood swings are just not okay.
rating: disappointed. and a bit grossed out.