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A review by mightyjor
Soulsmith by Will Wight
4.0
This book is the equivalent of popcorn and milk duds and a soda at the movie theater. It won’t exactly sustain you as the only thing you consume for the rest of your life, but when you’re in the moment consuming it it’s absolutely heavenly. There’s a discussion to be had here for what a perfect book actually is, and in this case, the book is clearly a novelization of the Naruto/Dragonball/Last Airbended shonen style anime and manga, and it does a fantastic job being just that.
You’re not going to tear up here. It’s not going to change you as a person. It’s going to give you huge surges of adrenaline though when some character powers up with some secret technique that he’d been hiding up his but for the last three weeks after everyone said he was powerless against him. And that’s exactly what this book is, power fantasy, pure and simple. I’m not a better person for having read this, just a thoroughly entertained one.
In saying that, I think this book doesn’t quite hit the same way the first one did as I found the first half to be extremely boring, so much so that I had a hard time continuing on. In that respect though, the fact that this audiobook takes like 5 hours to listen to on my standard 1.5x speed means that all it takes is commuting to work a couple times and you’re already in the second half which is infinitely more fun.
When I watch a shonen anime, I want to see our hero do insane, out of the box things to somehow overpower his much stronger opponents, then grow and become more powerful as a result. It’s a promise that was set up in book 1 and book 2 begins to deliver on that in wonderful juicy ways.
I’ll be continuing on with this series. The author gave all the books away for free (which is crazy) but I’ve also purchased every audiobook in the series, that’s how confident I am that I’m going to be happy with the whole thing.
You’re not going to tear up here. It’s not going to change you as a person. It’s going to give you huge surges of adrenaline though when some character powers up with some secret technique that he’d been hiding up his but for the last three weeks after everyone said he was powerless against him. And that’s exactly what this book is, power fantasy, pure and simple. I’m not a better person for having read this, just a thoroughly entertained one.
In saying that, I think this book doesn’t quite hit the same way the first one did as I found the first half to be extremely boring, so much so that I had a hard time continuing on. In that respect though, the fact that this audiobook takes like 5 hours to listen to on my standard 1.5x speed means that all it takes is commuting to work a couple times and you’re already in the second half which is infinitely more fun.
When I watch a shonen anime, I want to see our hero do insane, out of the box things to somehow overpower his much stronger opponents, then grow and become more powerful as a result. It’s a promise that was set up in book 1 and book 2 begins to deliver on that in wonderful juicy ways.
I’ll be continuing on with this series. The author gave all the books away for free (which is crazy) but I’ve also purchased every audiobook in the series, that’s how confident I am that I’m going to be happy with the whole thing.