Book 3, An Unwelcome Quest: Magic 2.0

I really liked the first book in this series. It was an inventive concept where geeks find out that they can manipulate a computer file and travel back in time and gain magical powers. The second one was OK, but didn't really add much. The third one is even more underwhelming.

Basically as the title suggests, there's a quest sort of like LOTR or D&D games. An enemy of the geeks traps them in a video game where they have to complete his rather easy, mundane tasks. The characters are largely bored, which then bores me as the reader. On top of that there's a second group who go after their friends to try to help them. So most everything happens twice and it's not that interesting the first time.

The concept isn't even that original. Being trapped in a video game isn't even an original concept--see Tron or Race Against Time, a book by one of my pseudonyms. The Simpsons, American Dad, and South Park have all done episodes prior to this book where their characters are in a Warcraft-style game doing quests.

But the worst part is that none of this really advances the characters or world much. I think a lot of the problem is the first book pretty much revolved around Martin, who was new to the world of wizardry and time travel, but these last two have no focal character. There's no one who readers can really get to know all that well and no real character development. That was something that held back a lot of the late Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, but they were usually insightful and funny enough to make up for it. This isn't.

Not to say it's terrible. It's amusing, but I often found myself tuning it out. From the first book I think the author is capable of better. Maybe it's just time to move on to a new series. This seems played out.

That is all.

I split the read between Audible and the Kindle version. The narrator is very good and probably earned the story an extra star.

This was a fun, humorous, engaging romp through some places many of us have been... terrible games you just have to get through, for some reason. There are books that I read that have amazing world-building and plot, but poor characters. This is the opposite of that. The characters are well defined (with just a couple of exceptions) and their response to external stimuli always fits nicely with what we've come to learn about them over the previous 2 books. They seem like versions of people I know. I think if some of my friends found "The File", this is truly how they would behave.

My fault with the book is that it didn't really do anything new. The character Jimmy mentions how they never really used time travel to do anything other than get from A to B, and it's true. There's no subtlety or surprises in how the amazing powers are used. The first book introduced the abilities these guys have and why they have them, and the second showed how other groups of people in other times/places have done similar but different things. Here, I had hoped to see some deeper diving on that. It started out that way, with the antagonist using what are basically pointers (if you are a software guy) in the file to redirect characters to somewhere outside of "reality". Ooooh the potential! But.. that's about as far as it goes.

I understand the author's hesitancy to spend too much time on the techy geeky parts and in so doing lose the fun of it all. I hope the series isn't over, though, and we can do more with this world. I'd like more on how changing past doesn't affect the future. I'd like to see more fun clever things done with reality. Maybe we can even touch on the nature of the file itself and its origins.

Overall, a fun, endearing effort that I very much enjoyed and would recommend to my friends. A particular subset of them. You know the ones I mean.

The beginning of this book is alright, the middle feels like it was written with very little effort, and the end finally returns to the quality of the rest of the series. It was definitely a let down from other two books, but had its moments of fun.

Scott Meyer's Magic series would be lost among the various lightweight mildly-amusing stories, but it's the perfect car audio for those moments when you just want to escape into a fun yarn. The narrator (this guy deserves a lot of credit!) hits just the right note to breathe life into the story and dialogue, and the whole thing comes together in a way that satisfies from start to finish. At about $10 for the track, it's below my threshold of "impulse purchase".

This third book in the series is slightly darker than its predecessors, and I appreciated the small transition in tone; it left me with a sense of progress, rather than simply recycling the same plot points. A fourth installment is clearly planned, and I'll happily toss in my $10 when it hits the market.

In awarding five stars, to be clear, this is in the context of an easygoing genre. Put Scott Meyer up against "War and Peace", and it's less than one star. And we should indeed read "War and Peace", which is really what it's all about. But sometimes even scholars need a break...

They way he developed these characters is awesome. Each has their own personality so different from one another, it's like you're not really reading the boom, rather watching everything unfold right in front of your eyes.

With this series Scott Meyer has cemented himself as one of my favorite authors. There are so few authors that can get me to laugh so hard I scare the cat, this guy does it relentlessly.

Buy the book!

Fun and pretty much beach reading fantasy. This is light fantasy that makes you smile from the character's conversation and interactions. Whenever Scott Myers goes back this world he created, I will partake.

This was beyond my expectations. Previous books were hilarious and inventive. Here it was like reading 2 books alternatives by following 2 groups doing same quests. I was skipping through pages. I wish this world could continue but in previous spirit.