I really enjoyed this one and I thought it was the best one yet. Maybe it is the fact that I took some time off of the series but I think it has to do with the fact that we finally got some real progression into the story. I usually don’t mind slice of life / meandering type content that much ( I mean I’m reading The Wandering Inn ffs) but it felt a little oppressive in this one.

I think this is mostly due to the fact that with very occasional exceptions we only really had one POV. While Alex still has by far the majority of POV time in this one, we do get quite a few different and new ones in this book which results in a cool mixup and overall makes the whole book feel more dynamic and just very refreshing.

The other POVs were mainly used to give some more context into the main conflict and yeah after we get teased with that plot without any real advancement for three whole books this is a very welcome change of pace.

Our main protagonist Alex also had quite some development in this one. After progressing at a pretty steady (and maybe somewhat slow) pace over the first three books he kind of unlocked the secret to power leveling in this one and powered up pretty absurdly pretty fast. For now this was very fun to experience but I hope the author won’t run into any power creep issues in the future. This story doesn’t quantify its progression so it’s impossible to “math it out” but he already does some pretty crazy things in this one. 

I also have to shout out the narration of Travis Baldree again. At this point we have quite a large cast of recurring characters and new ones get added constantly and he just keeps finding new and distinct voices for all of them. Very impressive work.