This story continues to expand the lore and world of Avatar. This story focuses on the origin story of Roku and introduces the origins of a lot of familiar characters in the original animated series; no prior knowledge is needed to read the story, but the additional context really changes how the read goes. 

I'll be honest: I skimmed the back half of this book. It was easy to do because the chapters were short, the style was so plain, and the plot was predictable. The plot I can blame at least in part on the fact that Roku was already pretty well fleshed out in the TV series, but that doesn't really excuse all the wink-nudge references and Easter eggs in this book. It felt more like Solo than anything ever should. "Did you know Gyatso coined 'Flame-o, hotman' XD LMAO." 

Compared to the Yangchen books, which are good, and the Kyoshi books, which are great, this felt much more like laying out the foundations for the A:TLA series than those, which felt like interesting stories in their own right that develop and expand on the universe of Avatar. Also, Roku here just feels like a stupid kid with no real glimmer of who we know he becomes, which is again totally different from the other books in this series. Ribay doesn't do enough to really build the relationship between Roku and Sozin to show why Roku would be so completely blind to the fact that his best friend is becoming a genocidal sociopath. We just have to take it on faith in the narration, rather than being shown. 

Anyway, super disappointing. If there are more of these books by Ribay, I probably won't read them.   

I have been an Avatar Roku hater since the first series- this novel does not make me like him more, but it does make me understand him and the context around his decisions more.  I look forward to his further development in the sequel. 

My Favorite of the Avatar books so far, Is that because this is the only one I listened to as an audio book...maybe