so-soDating and Dragons, by Kristy Boyce (2024)
⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
Premise: After moving to a new school, a teenager develops a crush on a member of her new D&D party, which has a strict no-dating policy.
Review: This was a mixed bag for me. On the plus side, it has some great intergenerational family content and an easy-to-root-for couple. ⬇️
so-soViper's Kiss was a lot better than the first installment but the plot was extremely convoluted and outlandish, even for a fantasy novel. Again, most of the story has very little to do with Yuan-ti politics, and the information about them is peppered with really odd, shock value information. (Did not need to know intimate details about their anatony)
panUnfortunately this was very boring and unengaging. This didn't focus much on political intrigue as much as MC meandering through the barely perceivable plot that poorly connects the yuan-ti to it. There is an attempt at character development but MC is just too rigid to change much.
I will continue the series to see if it gets better but I have little hope for that
so-soThe writing and dialogue felt stilted in parts and the narrator barrelled through the book as if he was in a rush. There was a good discussion about Nature vs Nurture and the definition of evil etc which i found interesting. Although the shady caravan leader suddenly growing a conscience felt off.
pickCute middle grade graphic novel about D&D. Recommend for Dimension 20 fans.
pickGreat collection of cities/towns for a verity of environments for dungeons and dragons!
so-soThis one was also okay. Some sections went on too long, especially the third half of the book. The dialogue felt awkward at points. The romance scenes were cringey and the reasoning behind the streamed games felt uninspired.
so-soI found a lot of this book skippable, although it could just be my current reading mood.
I wonder if some of these spells are like a copyright infringement because “Magic Hand“ isn't exactly what Mage Hand is called 😅
A bit of a spoiler, I guess, so I will tag it as such. I am already having an issue with this twist, not from a writing perspective, but more because I have seen things like that happen way too often.
So this character is saying, how they wouldn't be streaming if it didn't get views, and expressing desires to make it as big as CR or other big/famous liveplays, and I just find that very pathetic. Because people who click on liveplays--
Bookish Pair: Boyce‘s Dungeons and Drama (2024), which also involves teenagers playing D&D is much more successful 2d