The Calamitous Bob

Blurb

Ah, Nyil, with its magic, its monsters, and its petty gods. A divine spat leaves French medic Viv stranded in the middle of an arcane disaster zone crawling with undead horrors. Thankfully, there are strange allies to be found, not least the mysterious interface that helps humans survive in this merciless world.

Viv will have to progress fast to survive this calamity and find civilisation. She will also need a bit of luck. Unless, of course, she becomes the calamity herself. After all, luck is such a fickle thing.

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read all nine published novels.

For the longest time I held off reading this series because honestly I just didn’t vibe reading about an MC called Bob. It’s a silly name. If only I had read the blurb first. The MC is Viviane, but the language of where she’s isekai’d into doesn’t used the letter V, so people pronounce it ‘Bibiane’ and Viv gets grumpy one point and tells people to just call her Bob. Thankfully, it doesn’t stick.

Anyway, so why did I read all read through nine whole books in two weeks? The characters. I love the characters so much.

Viv is your hot-headed, takes-no-shit character and reminds me a lot of my own character Raysha (even down the hair colour and adorable draconic companion) except her powers are all based on black mana. There’s Solfis, the bone golem murder machine in the cover art, who will stop at nothing to see his dead empire resurrected under Viv’s glorious leadership. And of course, Arthur, aka She-Who-Feasts-On-Many-And-Gets-Much-Gold, is your arrogant but adorable dragonling that has been taught the joys of capitalism and compound interest. There are tons of other supporting and side characters, and I really appreciate how fleshed out all of them are. This is one of Mecanimus’ strong points as I’ve thought this when reading all series they’ve written.

Onto powers. Our MC is a magical prodigy… with a catch. Being dumped in a region saturated with black mana (ie the mana of death, annihilation, darkness, etc) means thats the only mana type she can use. It’s also killing her. But when something needs killing, Viv’s your girl. Meaningful progression here comes mostly from Viv’s experimentation and creating new spell forms. She starts with something akin to a whip attack, and then figures out long range, medium range, close range, area of effect, area denial, protective, utility, you name it, Viv’s thought about it. I wish there was some more theory crafting that goes into those spells (like how Corin gets into the weeds in Arcane Ascension), but that’s just because I’m a giant math nerd.

And as to the plot, there doesn’t seem right now to be a single overarching story plot (like the Abidan conflict in the Cradle as an example), and instead each book tends to focus on one independent conflict facing either Viv or the kingdom of New Harrack. Even arcs that I thought were going to turn into multi-book plotlines (like the reptile invasion) end up being resolved rather quickly towards the end of its book, to the point where I sort of do wish there was more to tie the arcs together. Instead it’s “Viv goes to X and solves the problem they were having,” followed by “Viv now goes to Y and solves the problem they were having.” Time will tell if these threads all get brought back together though. One of the benefits of this plotting approach is that there’s always something new happening. Wheel of Time gets to be a bit of a slog for like… four books… in the middle of the series because the plot drags through arcs that are way too extended and not interesting enough, and that certainly never happens in this series. Violence, short, sharp, and sudden, is the answer to 99% of life’s problems, and Viv lives life to the fullest.

I’ll be picking up the next book when it drops, just to see how Arthur’s bank is going and if she’s also on the path to worldwide domination through commercial means. Highly recommend.