As I said in my review of The Dungeon Book, I don’t play Dungeons & Dragons, but I seem to be picking up books that play with similar ideas (and do I have my first official D&D novel, The Feywild Job by C.L. Polk, to read soon).
In Homeward for a Spell, we have a standardish band of adventurers, including a leader/ranger, a wizard, a healer, a fighter, and a bard, who are contracted to recover a powerful artefact for a wealthy client.
This newly formed crew must head into dangerous lands in winter and make it back safely. But their leader, Sage, is constantly distracted from the Job by copping off with the bard, Araphi, whenever they are alone.
Sage is single, but she does have an ex-wife, and this is Araphi’s last moment of freedom before her political marriage to a man she doesn’t love and rarely sees.
This is a very spicy sapphic romance and an enjoyable fantasy story. I do think it is too spice-heavy, as it becomes kind of relentless and inevitable.
That might be because I really wanted to get back to the plot, but it often felt tonally wrong. But those moments did move the characters or the plot along, and were well-written.
I also liked how they solved the wider problem of Araphi’s impending marriage, and how it was linked into the journey she signed up for.
I didn’t realise this was a sequel until I read it. Events clearly went on in Homegrown Magic, and they are constantly referenced here, as they are linked to the background. But I felt this worked on its own, and the mentions are only slightly distracting.
I’d love to revisit this world, but I don’t think I need to read the first one, as it feels like I already know all the major bits. If you’re looking for a spicy fantasy adventure, you can’t go wrong if you read this one.
Rating Scale: • Loved/Inducted (Personal Canon, 4.5-5★) • Liked/Passing Through (Not Quite Canon, 3.75-4.25★) • Impactful but Flawed/Missed Swings (2.75-3.5★) • Reshelved (Soft DNF) • Not for Me (1-2.5★ or Hard DNF)
Smyth is growing as a writer with each book, and The Unfathomable Curse is the best in the series so far.
In this instalment, The Undetectables detective agency faces its most personal case yet, and they are on the clock to solve it before a fatal deadline.
Will they solve the mystery in time, or will they be left with more questions and corpses?
That depends on whether they can get the Ghoul Council to react without first holding a meeting about it.
From the opening pages, Smyth is whisking the characters between gravesites, witness interviews, and stakeouts, while coping with a still-not-right Theo and running two investigations.
What is brilliant is that this book focuses on Cornelia. I was a bit miffed reading the last one because Smyth moved Mallory away from the centre of attention and made Diana the main focus.
Though this didn’t occur to me until I was a good chunk in, I now see that each book gives one of them their moment in the spotlight. I can see this choice means the reader gets to know and understand each of them better by getting into their heads. I want to go back and re-read the earlier books now that I know Cornelia better.
Now I understand why this is a four-book series.
It’s one of those books where it’s better not to think too deeply about the structure of the world-building.
For example, the Ghoul Council burying itself in paperwork rather than addressing the crisis directly explains why Cornelia’s relationship with her family is the way it is (her parents head the council) and helps move the plot along by their inaction, so the detectives can investigate without their help. I can understand why Smyth chose to do this, but it can feel off because they seem constrained by the plot rather than by their own behaviour.
The only other issue is that sometimes scenes with the main characters turn into isolated bubbles where the side characters are forgotten. There are moments where the other people in the scene should be having quite a strong response to what has just been revealed to them.
For example, late in the book, actions have been taken that I would demand be repaired, but no one demands anything, and no one talks about it. Instead, those other characters just seem to vanish from the conversation and the scene itself – to be fair, I might have missed the description of it happening, but it shouldn’t have been a throwaway line if it was mentioned.
Given this book’s ending and Theo’s behaviour throughout, the final instalment will almost certainly focus on his thoughts, feelings, and motivations.
It’s one of those books where you get towards the end and wonder why you’ve got so many pages left. It’s because Smyth has more surprises to spring. The revelations are well thought out and presented in surprising and shocking ways.
The ideas introduced here also cast the earlier mysteries in a new, disturbing light.
My love for Mallory, Diana, and Cornelia is only getting stronger. Though I wonder if I’ll ever like Theo again.
If you, too, were captivated by the lives of Mallory, Diana and Cornelia and enjoy seeing them work a case, then you’re going to enjoy this.
I have no idea what the final book will reveal. Smyth has put many pieces in play by seeding them throughout the books. I predict I’ll be pleasantly shocked by what the 4th and final book, The Unsolvable Case, reveals.
Rating Scale: Loved/Inducted (Personal Canon, 4.5-5★) • Liked/Passing Through (Not Quite Canon, 3.75-4.25★) • Impactful but Flawed/Missed Swings (2.75-3.5★) • Reshelved (Soft DNF) • Not for Me (1-2.5★ or Hard DNF)
Spoilers: Mild (premise, themes, and early plot developments) Genre: Science Fiction, LitRPG Format: Hardback Source: Bought Rating: Liked
On my copy of Dungeon Crawler Carl (DCC), under the dust jacket, it says, ‘You Will Not Break Me’. Whatever else you think of Carl, this sentiment holds true through book one and, based on what happens here, through the series as a whole.
DCC is one of the most popular titles in the relatively new genre label of LitRPG, and it deserves that status.
It focuses on Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, who just happen to be outside in the right place when the game commences and wipes out most of humanity.
As a reward for surviving this near-extinction-level event, all new players, Crawlers, must survive a series of puzzles, skirmishes, and occasional boss battles against “things” that are solely there to kill them. Their survival mostly depends on getting stronger and killing “things”, even if those things turn out to be their fellow humans.
I had to pause reading DCC around 1/3 of the way in, as I grew uncomfortable with Carl’s initial portrayal.
I am very much a ‘I care about the people more than the system’ person. Carl kills a confused, mutated woman and a crèche of goblin babies, showing little reaction to either his actions or his foes’ deaths.
I may have prematurely concluded that ‘I understand what DCC is trying to do, and I don’t think finishing it will change that—but maybe I’ll come to like it.’
After picking it back up and reading more, I did. I saw Carl as stoic and practical in his response — he later reflects that they are all there to die. Given Carl’s background as a Coast Guard veteran, I wondered if that’s just how they make them. His cat does act like an arsehole. But that’s a cat for you, especially one with trophies and rosettes, though even she acknowledges that Carl is trying to do the right thing in challenging circumstances.
Given his mantra of ‘You Will Not Break Me’, I started taking notes on when Carl was sympathetic or heroic in the face of everything he’s been pitted against. I feel the evidence shows he’s a ‘good guy’ in a bad world, and it makes you wonder what you would do. Just wait to die? Or try to survive and hope?
The ‘cleverness’ of this work, and perhaps of the genre, is that it takes the core mechanics of an RPG and reveals the brutal reality behind them. The system is against him—he’s there to kill and, ultimately, to die, in an entertaining way.
And that’s what video games do: they work in the abstract; they are pixels on a screen, and now there’s blood on the dungeon floor.
This isn’t a game. It’s real life, with all the complexities and the games within games that we all experience.
Carl gets to see that as he’s introduced to more than one of the Wizards behind the curtain. And in later scenes, Matt draws Carl into what the game represents: the politics, the promises and the control it exerts over everyone, because almost everyone is a victim.
As a video game-to-page adaptation, I can’t fault it. The explanations of weapons, bosses, and other baddies are good, and the AI overseer is funny, often inappropriately so. It feels like a video game experienced through all five senses.
You have to assume that everyone is going to die, including the crawlers and the NPCs (non-playable characters), even if they themselves might not know it. It’s a story told against that injustice, focusing on a character who’s trying his best, given his upbringing and background.
There is a lot to enjoy. The interactions, the characters, the system, the politics, and the backdrop against which it’s set.
Am I going to read the next one? Yes. And the one after that. I’m told that books 2 and 3 need to be read together to get the point Dinniman is trying to make.
I don’t think it’s a celebratory story; it’s brutal and shows the reality of RPGs while trying to satirise late-stage capitalism, which values money and entertainment over anything an individual might experience.
Do I expect it to soften its use of problematic gazes (see below)? Hopefully. I hear that it does as the series continues.
I guess we’ll see.
Addendum:
As a satire on capitalism, it’s complicated. Carl and probably the author, Matt, see the world through a white male gaze. I know more about the anatomy of his encounters with women than I wish. I’m not sure he ever mentions the guns, pecs, and thighs of any of the men he encounters.
As other commentary has pointed out, it’s great to call out what capitalism represents, but it might still rely too heavily on the language and framing of the worldview it’s trying to satirise, which makes it hard to distinguish between commentary and ingrained bias.
Spoilers: Mild (premise, themes, and early plot developments) Genre: Science Fiction Format: Paperback Source: Bought Rating: Loved
Would you fight for a love that feels right, even if it’s for someone you’ve never met? Not because you don’t want to, but because time has separated you by 6 months? Sounds crazy, right? But that’s what happens to Tressa Fay Robeson in Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon.
Tressa Fay is a successful and popular hairdresser known for giving her clients life-changing hairstyles. She is still recovering from a break-up when a random text message sends her across town on a date, only to be stood up at the bar. Well, not exactly stood up. Her date tells her where she is, but they aren’t there. And they didn’t stand each other up. They were both at the bar. It’s just that Tressa Fay is in the present and her date (Meryl) was waiting for her six months ago. Tressa Fay tells her friends that she’s texting a hot woman in the past, and they believe her.
From there, you and the characters enter a trust bubble. You have to trust that Meryl and Tressa Fay can communicate via text as the characters do, and believe that it’s really happening. We spend the opening section of the book focusing solely on Tressa Fay in the present. This shows us that, in the past, Tressa Fay hadn’t met Meryl and confirms she wasn’t supposed to. But Meryl doesn’t want to be trapped in a future where she disappears and doesn’t get to love Tressa Fay, even if it has consequences.
I think Annie Mare does an outstanding job not only of bouncing between timelines but also of guiding the reader through complex scientific concepts. Mare navigates them expertly because she’s hyper-focused on the emotional connections shared by all the characters.
This is Mare’s and the book’s strength. She was happy to hold my heart in her grip. I cared about all of their futures with all my heart. I teared up, held my breath, and crossed my fingers for the right things to happen.
But the science isn’t the driver of the story; the driver is two people who are passionately in love, desperate to meet and desperate not to lose each other, but it’ll only happen if they play the science right.
With seemingly nothing to lose but everything to gain, they start messing with time.
All their pasts and futures become tangled; their connections are so tenuous because the present could be changed, and they could be severed from each other at any moment.
They have the power to tell Meryl her future, and I kept wondering which upcoming past event they would choose to change and how it would manifest in the present. This tightened her fist around my heart like a vice for almost the entire time.
It’s a hard premise to land — how much of the mystery do you explain? Do you go where the readers expect, or where you expect? I think the concept for resolving the overlapping time was masterful; I was expecting one last dramatic revelation, and it didn’t come, and what happened as a result didn’t work for me.
Mare, I think, wanted a specific tone for the ending, but instead of leaning into the danger of their experimentation, she played it too safe. All the tension I had been holding slipped away, leaving me slightly deflated.
Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon, to me, is a meditation on the nature of love. The story itself feels like an instructor. I was its student. Because Meryl doesn’t want to be trapped in a future where she disappears and never gets to love Tressa Fay, every observation felt like something I needed to study and hold onto. There were so many observations I felt compelled to write down to study later. I loved watching them and taking notes as I explored, changed, loved and laughed — I just can’t promise you’ll like the last few pages.
Recommended for anyone who enjoys (or thinks they’ll enjoy) a mix of sapphic yearning and science fiction.
Note: I rate on a four-tier scale: Loved (4.5–5★), Liked (3.75–4.25★), Mixed (2.75–3.5★), and Not for me (1–2.5★).
I flew through the first 1/3 of the novel because I love the video game RPG genre and this was my first experience reading about how LitRPG turns them into a linear adventure. But my opinion changed when I read two scenes that came quite close together.
Now, for the next three or four paragraphs, there are spoilers: Carl, up to this point, has been killing non-human characters to survive; it’s been very much attack-or-die. As a reader, I haven’t really expected him to have been deeply reflecting on the horror of the situation
But there were two scenes where Carl wasn’t immediately attacked and had a chance to interact rather than react to the ‘baddies’.
*** There are spoilers in the next two paragraphs ***
In one, a mutated human speaks Spanish, which shows his opponent is scared and confused. Carl doesn’t understand Spanish, and a translation isn’t provided to the reader. But he still acts with violence, despite the doubts he expresses about facing an almost-human character.
Matt doesn’t pause the action here; Carl moves on. He meets a group of goblins who don’t kill him on sight because they recognise his tattoo, which he received as a ‘bonus’ for killing another goblin group earlier. He doesn’t explain this. Instead, he uses it to gain access to their inner sanctum. They treat him with kindness, and he repays that by carrying out a mass killing.
I thought that it would set the tone for the rest of the book – kill indiscriminately, get loot, and level up.
But without the author exploring the emotional impact, it felt like it would be reductive and ultimately a hollow experience. I need to at least feel there is a point to the story, even if it makes me feel uncomfortable.
And when I reached this thought earlier last week, I closed the book, fully intending to DNF it.
I shared my disappointment on Bluesky, hoping someone would tell me I was wrong.
Ummm, at 1/3 in, I’m not sure that I like Carl or the cat in Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Some are grimdark for the sake of grimdark. Characters often lament never getting planes, the internet, mobile phones, etc. again, but they don’t contemplate the sheer horror.
It made me wonder if my reaction was the problem. Carl wasn’t supposed to care, and that was intentional and an expected trope because the genre as a whole focuses on the macro rather than the individual’s emotional impact.
I’ve previously said, way back in 2023, in the context of The Poppy War Trilogy:
I don’t plan on going back to grimdark consciously, at least not for a while, unless I read a series that is grimdark but I don’t realise it is.
And it seemed that reading Matt or the Clarke Award had ‘fooled’ me into reading it.
But both Somhairle’s framing and the fact that it’s up for a Clarke Award have me intrigued. I’m wondering if I can continue, knowing this will be the pattern from here on out.
The replies in the thread imply that Carl doesn’t suddenly become empathetic as the series goes on. Growth may kick in about book 4 or 5.
And the creator has said that it’s not what it first seems:
Every war, every social movement has multiple battlefields, and not every battlefield has to be the front line. I want people with different points of view to enjoy these books at face value. If I then manage to drill through their thick skulls and make them think about the broader themes and maybe grow an empathetic spark, all the better.
So, maybe I am having the reaction that the author is expecting. I went out of my way to translate the Spanish dialogue in that first scene, and I think that’s perhaps what led me to project a negative association between Carl and his creator.
I think the problem is that I don’t feel that I need the lesson.
Killing anything should come with awareness.
And I wonder if my curiosity would drive me to read through my own discomfort and dissociation, to complete my reading of the rest of the books. Given that I can’t even force myself to read the next book in the series that I LOVE, I highly doubt it.
By the way, I love how the RPG elements are integrated; it’s just the lack of empathy for the ‘Non-Playable Characters’ even if that makes readers think about the choices that Carl is and isn’t making.
And because of Kelly’s framing, I do want to go back to DCC with both the author’s intent and the type of genre it is.
I now want to read The Transcendent Green by Mati Ocha (https://matiocha.com) as it was recommended by Somhairle Kelly, as they described it as ‘respectful, authentically Gaelic, and depicts the horrors without callousness or apocalypse porn. And fundamentally hopepunk‘
I understand what DCC is trying to do, and I don’t think finishing it will change that—but maybe I’ll come to like it. Should I continue, or is this just not for me?
