The Carnelian Fox Book Review

The Carnelian Fox is book one is the new series Maiyamon by Kay MacLeod. The book was first published on November 9th, 2019. Only book one is out so far and I am not sure of how many other books there will be.

This book takes place in a Pokémon-esque world. After college people can choose to get a gem (basically a Pokémon) and go on an adventure to get their gem licence. There are two types of gems, shows and battles. Shows are for the beauty pageants and battles are for, surprise surprise, battling. Each gem can evolve three times and one per team can become an elder gem, which is much more powerful. The main character is named Sam and she is close friends with Callum, the son of the most popular battle gems. They both aspire to become the best battle gem and upon choosing their gems they set off together to try and become the very best, like no one ever was. Shortly after starting their journey, Sam has to go it along and go to each challenge and complete them, without Callum's help. Sam is soon wrapped up in a fight against a secret organization that thinks gems are a menace and need to be eradicated. Does any of that sound familiar?

This novel is just a textbook Pokémon story in novel form, which did make an interesting story, even though the plot was going to be pretty obvious. The story was good, but I did have some major issues. One of those was this wasn't LitRPG, it was gamelit. Because of that, there were no stats, or moves, or the clear outlines of power that appear in the games. The battles described then seemed much more non-structured, and not in a good way. I would have loved to see stats, experience, moves, etc. in this book. It would have made the book infinitely better. Another issue I had is for most of the book, except the last few chapters, is it ended with the characters thoughts, even though the book was already first person. The thoughts at the start were very ominous and got old very very quickly, I grew to despise the "If only I knew that..." or "I wish I had done ___ instead" and things like that. Later though it just told what happened in the space between one chapter and another, which was also annoying because it would skip most of the gem's training. Had it been there you would have gotten a better understanding on the main character's personality, the gem's personalities and skills, and the travel partner's personalities and their gems skills and abilities. This was something I really wished the author would have left in because it made it feel like most of the people in the book were total strangers. I feel like those three things, no stats, the thoughts at the end of chapters, and skipping the gem's growth, really ruined this story and left it as just an okay book. If it still sounds interesting and like something for you, it may be worth it to try because it wasn't a bad story, it just isn't something I would recommend as a good one.