Carrie Vaughn

It's said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and an eccentric billionaire has set out to prove it by building an island retreat that brings the fantastic to life. In an action-packed novel for fans of Ready Player One, Carrie Vaughn asks what happens when a bunch of tech geeks and fantasy nerds don't realize the game they are now playing is for real?

Questland

Kirsten Maliepaard

Tech meets fantasy when a billionaire tech genius creates an island where technology is indistinguishable from magic. It looks like a dream come true, except his team starts a mutiny and he thinks only Addie Cox can help him get his island back.

I was really excited to read this book. I admit I absolutely love fantasy worlds like Narnia and Middle Earth. Did this story live up to my expectation? No, not really to be honest. Let me explain why:

First, I want to point out that it took me really long to get interested in the characters. I had trouble keeping them apart for the first 80 pages, and the story didn't make me feel like I wanted to get to know them. Also, I think Addie was just not that likable to me. I wanted to like her, but just couldn't. Also, the character-building for Dominic was just not enough

The first few problems the team ran into after arriving on the island, moved way too fast for me. After 150 pages the story started moving a bit slower, but that was not for long because the last 50 pages moved really fast again. Just too fast for my liking. I did not have the time to really get invested in what was happening in the story because before I knew it, the moment was gone.

What I obviously loved were all the tropes from fandoms that I knew, that got mentioned. But at the same time, it felt like so many things I already knew, that I missed some original elements. Maybe if a few original elements had been put on the island, I would have liked it more.

It also felt like the same thing just happened over and over again. Addie got herself in trouble and she had to be saved. Only the end was different, but to me, that came out of nowhere and it should have had more of a buildup.

Darren S. Layne

I don't want to be mean to Carrie or to anyone else who enjoyed Questland, but to me this read like a lazy rehash of Dream Park without any of the subtlety, wonder, mystery, or character and story development. The overt preciousness of the main character and her anti-feminist token romance with the antagonist were almost unbearable, and the machine-gun drops of various geek-cred nods came off less like a tribute to the genre(s) and much more like a checklist of callbacks to placate the widest possible audience – not a difficult feat when, as the author describes in her acknowledgments, geek culture has become so decidedly mainstream and overwhelmingly commercial. Vaughn has put to paper what Netflix had already inflicted upon us with Stranger Things: an uninspired stream of token nostalgia masquerading as original content. Unfortunately, this adventure has already been run, and it was way better back in the day.

I know Carrie can do better, because her Wild Cards work is right up there with many of the other talented authors in the collective.

Questland

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