Leveling With Liam by G.W. DurstelerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Upfront, let me say that I went into this expecting the editing to be scruffy. LitRPG is one of those genres (along with supers and steampunk) that for some reason attracts writers who don't have a strong grasp of basic prose mechanics. They will leave out the comma before a term of address ("I don't know Mia" means something different from "I don't know, Mia"), mispunctuate dialog (the tag is not a separate sentence, and if the same speaker continues in a new paragraph, there's no closing quotation mark in the first paragraph), make vocabulary errors either by mistyping or by confusing two different words (instance/instant, near-do-wells/ne'er-do-wells, anymore/any more, exaltation/exhortation, dias/dais, test/tent, grim/grime, fairing/faring, twice/probably a typo for twigs or twine, deferred/demurred), miss out the past perfect tense, perpetrate sloppy typos like double periods, double commas, or a comma and a period together, spell several character names two different ways on the same page, and occasionally miss closing quotation marks.
This one made all the above errors, and more, but I have seen far worse in the genre. It's about as bad as, say, Beware of Chicken , which isn't good, but isn't so bad that it's unreadable, like some I could mention. Disclaimer as always: I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and there may be more editing done before publication.
Again like others in the genre, continuity is not a strength. Both beaver mayors change gender in the course of the narrative, one of them twice, and a boat trip takes place both downstream and upstream while heading in the same direction. Though in that case I may have misunderstood how the streams related to each other; it wasn't very clearly explained.
Also, of course, part of the genre is that some things only make sense by game logic, like a legendary artefact being in an unlocked chest in a random room off a corridor that a passing adventurer can just loot with no consequences.
Setting all of that aside, though, this is a mostly genial LitRPG without too much of the game mechanics - the narrator shares his character sheet a few times, but not every second chapter, and there's more of a focus on the traits than the numbers - and with a genuinely decent, likeable main character. Liam is a natural-born paladin, who will look after his party member before himself.
His party member, Mia, is less appealing: a fire mage who is blasé about collateral damage. For me, the part I liked least, and the reason I say mostly genial, was (view spoiler)
I did think that the leveling mentioned in the title happened a bit too often and too easily. Liam goes up by 15 levels in the course of three quests, sometimes as many as six levels at once, ending the book at level 18, and the level cap is 60. I'd like to spend a lot more time with Liam, but his rapid advancement means that I won't get that opportunity for as long as I'd like, especially given that this was a short book to start with. I'm not looking for a tedious grind, but something between that and this would be nice.
I will look out for the next book, because I enjoyed this and want to encourage LitRPG with a main character who isn't an egotistical tool. And I do recommend it, with the caveats above taking it to the Bronze tier of my Best of the Year for 2025.
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