3/5 stars
Synopsis
Warning! This section contains spoilers, if you would like to avoid these spoilers, jump to the review below.
The book started off with the main character, Wolf, leaving his school. When he got home, he was questioned by his mom as to why he was late coming home. A moment later, a mysterious blue box appeared and said that the Milky Way galaxy was being appropriated, and they had twenty seconds to prepare. Wolf’s father yelled at everyone to grab a weapon.
The main character was transported to a white room and given a tutorial. After the tutorial, the main character met up with his family.
They hunted wolves, and Wolf found two of his friends.
There was a guy who tried to take over the safe zone, but the main character’s family helped stop him. Then the parents trained their kids.
The main character chose his class, which resulted in a mutation, then he was notified that he was chosen for a special dungeon, and was teleported away.
He started fighting his way through the dungeon.
He started grinding levels.
Wolf got a mysterious message from someone who wanted to meet with him. When he met with them, he learned they were an Administrator and that they wanted to sponsor him.
Wolf made his way through the dungeon, eventually reaching level 100, and underwent a second mutation.
Review
I thought this book was okay. It was good enough to hold my interest, and it didn’t drag. I do want to see what happens in the next book, but there were some issues I had with the story.
This book had a lot of repetition with words or phrases. For example: “The pharaoh suddenly roars as its bandages undo themselves and they suddenly begin to fly towards me.” The book would benefit from having an editor go through it to clean up the story and writing. The plot itself was repetitive. The entire story was Wolf defeating every monster he came across.
There were frequent point of view shifts to the commentators and spectators who were watching Wolf fight. This was annoying because I got Wolf’s actions through a third party. Instead of reading about them as they were happening, I was reading the reactions the commentators had to what Wolf was doing. They would describe his actions as they watched him. I didn’t want his actions described to me; I wanted to see Wolf’s actions through Wolf’s eyes.
Because of the frequent point of view shifts, this book felt like it had three or four different plot lines. There was Wolf, and the spectators and commentators, and the people who were interested in sponsoring him, and the people back in the safe zone Wolf had left. I didn’t feel like the plot lines were resolved. It just felt like they fizzled into nothing. The main conflict in the book was Wolf’s dungeon crawl, but frequently it seemed to take a backseat to the commentators. I think the author tried to set up one of the other dungeon crawlers as Wolf’s nemesis, but it didn’t work out because Wolf only saw him in person once, and the guy ran away instead of trying to fight Wolf.
The book felt too convenient. Everything was super easy for Wolf. He was almost able to waltz through the dungeon. He frequently walked along with his hands in his pockets, whistling a tune. It would have been better if he actually had something to challenge him. The author frequently wrote that the monster Wolf had just fought was the hardest monster he had had to deal with yet, that it was the greatest challenge he had had to deal with. But that wasn’t shown. What was shown was Wolf absolutely wiping the floor with the monsters. Where was the challenge? It would have been nice to see him actually struggle.
I didn’t feel like Wolf’s character was developed well. He already knew how to fight, so he didn’t really need to learn and grow. As I was reading, I was constantly told he was a very laid back person but he just seemed normal to me. Except for his complete aversion to being touched. Why was he like that? There was no explanation except for he’d “always been like that.” What happened to him to make him not want to be touched?
I thought it was really weird that his parents were retired assassins who had trained their kids to be assassins, and how to fight unarmed, with knives, swords, etc. But not with guns. In the modern era, a gun is a more relevant weapon than a sword. I know that the author made the parents into retired assassins to explain Wolf’s fighting prowess, but it still felt weird. It was also weird that the people around them (neighbors) knew that they were retired assassins. Isn’t that kind of knowledge normally top secret?
All that being said, the book was interesting enough that I want to see what happens next.
Fireheart Books 