3.5*
My feelings about these books are complicated. On the one hand, I spent hours reading them and enjoyed a fair amount of it. On the other the series has issues and some are profoundly annoying.
On the plus side there’s the story, which is why I kept reading.
On the minus side, there’s the dialogue, especially the characters‘ tendency to chuckle at completely inappropriate moments. “Haha, sorry, sorry!” “Haha, since everyone is ready, let’s hit the road.” “Haha, one of the first quests I got when I logged in.” As I’m not a masochist, I didn’t count the total number of times ‘Haha’ showed up, either just in this book or in the series as a whole, but believe me, the frequency was appalling.
Who talks like that? No one I’ve ever heard. At first it was just Thorn/Xavier, but as the books went on, far too many other people began doing it too. Nails on a chalkboard for me…Every Single Time.
Everyone also kept responding with “That’s a great question.” It started with Myst when she was walking Xavier through his intro to Nova Terra, then Thorn picked it up, followed by too many others. When all of an author’s characters start to sound alike, it’s a problem. Real people have their own speech patterns and rhythms, characters should too.
There was no real ending to the series, and answers to the biggest questions about who Thorn is and what’s really happening were left for the next series.
The character- and quest sheets were intrusive and over-long. The author should have just highlighted the part that changed, rather than repeating the whole thing. Sometimes what shifted was only one sentence or percentage, so making the reader wade through half a page trying to figure out what was different about it was a real time waster.
The books badly needed a good editor. There were many grammatical errors, mostly incomplete edits, and sentences whose pronoun referred to the wrong person, etc.
Like I said, they were complicated for me, but I did keep reading them. . .