Posted by I am hauling my way through this series. It was exactly what I needed at this point in my life — which was silly, fun, fast-paced, and with characters I adore.
I love watching Donut mature and become more of a serious contender in the crawl. She’s becoming less impulsive and starts to make decisions that consider the future and aren’t made as in-the-moment impulses with little regard to how that will affect herself or others. She also begins to value other people’s input and recognizes that she needs the assistance of others to get through this crawl.
We get more of Carl’s backstory which delves deeper into his terrible childhood and abusive father. His mom was also the culprit of one of his largest traumas, too. Broken people do broken things and we start to see that more and more with Carl, and maybe why he stayed with Beatrice for so long even knowing who she was deep down.
The side characters also begin to have larger parts in the story. Mordecai continues to develop, we get hints at what may have happened to him in past seasons, his very first crawl, his relationship to Audette, and why people are interested in his success or failure since it’s supposed to be his last season if he can get Donut down to a deep enough level. That said, the secondary character that really storms onto the team and grows as a character is Katia, in my humble opinion. She joined up with Carl and Donut as a very timid woman and Carl doesn’t even know how she made it far enough to join them. But by the end of this book she’s become formidable and I love it. I also like the fact that she has more of a “normal” personality that isn’t as exaggerated as Donut’s. Donut is entertaining but if there was more than one larger-than-life personality in the group it could be too much. I think she also represents how most of us would actually feel and react in a situation like this. Many of us want to think we’d be kicking ass and taking names, or figuring out clever ways to get through the levels, but I think most people would really be like, “wtf, wtf, wtf” and struggle to both survive and appeal to an audience. Katia’s viewer rate is far lower than either Donut or Carl, and it starts to be an issue. I personally feel like Katia brings a nice balance to the group and she’s definitely growing on me the longer she’s teamed up with Carl and Donut.
This book’s theme is trains and it’s a little M.C. Escher-like with trains coming and going on all sorts of levels and feeling like it’s multidimensional. The trains are also puzzles, with the team having to figure out what the numbers and names behind the trains means and how to get to the stairs and safe spaces. There are also NPCs who start to realize what they are and where they are, and it starts to have big ramifications on everyone. This element also adds a dark undertone which only get darker and more prevalent as the series continues. As I mentioned in an earlier review, the contrast from humor to more serious moments gives both of these moods time to shine and have impact. I find it tiring when a book is relentlessly silly or just so overly dark that I become deadened to it and instead of having a lot of emotions I just get bored, if that makes sense.
I loved the expansion of the world building in this one. There’s a device that Carl gets that allows him to see the notes and thoughts of crawlers that have come before him. It’s a great way to drop some exposition but have it fascinating and intriguing rather than boring, and it makes sense in context as well. We learn a lot about how crawls have been done in the past, the politics between the races that run the shows, the fates of races that have come before, the rules of the dungeon and the evolution of the rules over the various seasons, there’s just so much this new tool gives us. Carl also starts writing in the journal type thing and we get to see more of his inner thoughts and what he feels would be of value to others in the future. I found all of it really interesting and flew right into book 4.
This is a great continuation that I enjoyed as much as the first.