Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

As of writing this review, I’ve read everything published, which is books one through to nine in the series.

Blurb

Elaine is ripped from this world to Pallos, a land of unlimited possibilities made real by a grand System governing classes, skills, and magic.

An ideal society? What is this, a fantasy novel?

Adventures? Right this way!

A Grand quest? Nah.

Friends and loot? Heck yes!

Humans are the top dog? Nope, dinosaur food.

Healing and fighting? Well, everything is trying to eat her.

Join Elaine as she travels around Pallos, discovering all the wonders and mysteries of the world, trying to find a place where she belongs, hunting those elusive mangos, all while the ominous Dragoneye Moons watch her every move.

Thoughts

Having read nine very chunky books in this series so far is probably a good indication I enjoyed it. The premise is fairly standard for your isekai serial - Earth human dies, reincarnated in a land with a system, and then abuses all their Earth-based knowledge to get ahead. Granted, in Elaine’s case, she’s reincarnated as a baby and so has to wait to grow up a bit, but the principle is the same.

The society Elaine is borne into is anathema to her; women are effectively property, don’t have real jobs, get married off, don’t read and write, you know the drill. So when her parents secure her marriage to a rich family and their rapey son, she decides it’s time to get out and about, and joins her friend/mentor Artemis in the Rangers. I’m not going to call this spoilers, because it’s incredibly obvious where the plot is going from the first few pages.

Funnily enough, most of the criticisms I see levelled against the story are about the society and their treatment of women, but I am going to lump all of those BS reviews in the vocal minority of LitRPG readers that want “numbers go up” with nothing even vaguely resembling politics or modern day issues in their serials. The society Selkie has created is not a caricature, it is not a cheap strawman designed to make a political statement, it’s exactly how many societies on Earth functioned for thousands of years. I enjoyed reading about it, because I liked how Elaine set about trying to change things.

Back on track! Elaine is the main PoV character, with a few small interludes here and there. Some of the later books include long interludes from Iona, set initially far in the future. I skipped them initially, until with a many-thousand year time skip from the Fae realm moved the story into said future, and Iona became a main character with Elaine.

Characters, whether it’s Elaine, Iona, family, or secondary ones, are done well. The worldbuilding is solid, and the skill progression Elaine gets is both satisfying and feels well-earned.

The only two things I feel could have been done different relate to stats feeling useless, and a large change in pace/setting/plot.

On the first point, there are stats like Strength which function as your typical multiplier on your base body. Elaine starts with very low strength (<20), but eventually raises her strength to 100. As the story goes on, over the course of many, many books, all her physical stats break the thousand barrier, with her magic stats breaking the tens of thousands. However, we’re still given scenarios like trying to jump from one rooftop to another over a street, and Elaine bemoaning how her low strength (compared to physical classers) means she can’t make it. Which sort of makes the stats feel pointless. Stats in the thousands represent someone being dozens and dozens of times stronger than a normal human. And yet simple things seem to remain beyond reach all the time.

This was done, I believe, to ensure things don’t get too off the rails when numbers become ludicrously large. This is especially prevalent in the change of pace I referred to above. The series seemed to have a very nice ending point (at book seven, I think it was, when Elaine and Artemis head out to find Julius). Instead, Elaine and her friends enter the Fae realm, where around 20000 years pass before they are spat out into a world with new races, new countries, new ways of using the system (runic magic, cultivation, the whole kit and kaboodle from all your favourite LitRPG classics). With this soft reset of the world also comes a similar “what do these stat numbers even mean any more.” This is where the magic school part of the story kicks in, and it is fun to read, it’s just a very large change of everything from the previous story.

Those sort of soft reset moments are a fairly common trope in serials, especially with cultivation. Like, take Martial Peak - as soon as the MC is the strongest level, oops, damn, looks like he’s been living in a pocket dimension! There’s an even bigger world out there! Repeat. I know some people love this trope too, in which case, jackpot.

So to summarise, characters are a blast, and there are a wide variety of problems solved in fun ways with skills and brainpower. Progression feels earned, and while some of the stats don’t make sense to me all the time, that’s probably the case for every single long serial I’ve ever read. I really enjoyed reading through all these books, so thanks Selkie for publishing so many, and I’ll pick up book ten as soon as it’s out.