Book Review: Book of Games by John Peel

Book #76 of 2024:

Book of Games by John Peel (Diadem #12)

This novel is one of two that author John Peel self-published (in a single bound volume) to close out his long-running Diadem fantasy saga, but I really wish he hadn’t bothered. It’s an embarrassingly poor effort, riddled with typos, repetitive wording, and rather basic continuity errors that any competent proofreader should have been able to catch. (To pick just a few examples: the planet from book #8 is referred to as Ocean instead of Brine, the spelling of Zarathan temporarily switches to Xarathan for a few pages, and Destiny gives her age as twenty-three after earlier saying that she’s twenty-seven.)

The protagonists all feel out-of-character, too — Score keeps threatening to spank people for some reason, Helaine calls the antagonist a bitch and a slut, and so on. The warrior girl is also sexually objectified herself pretty strongly throughout the text, with other characters making comments about her chest and legs, calling her a bimbo, and magically forcing her into skimpy “harem gear.” If this is Peel’s unfiltered writing, his former publishers must have been doing quite a lot of unsung work to shape it into acceptable middle-grade and YA fare before.

The plot, such as it is: we basically abandon the unresolved time-travel antics of the previous story to whisk the heroes along a sequence of artificial storybook scenarios, playing the imposed roles whilst trying to gain the upper hand over their opponent. It’s like one of the more infuriating Q or holodeck malfunction episodes of Star Trek, and although it eventually wraps around to perfunctorily conclude the business concerning Score’s mother, there’s no real sense of urgency or climax like an epic final showdown against the Triad or anything. No, instead the teens simply convince the superpowered eleven-year-old that they aren’t the bad guys like Destiny said, team up to stop her, and notice almost in passing that Oracle has become corporeal again. And then in the literal closing sentence of the book he announces that he’s dating Shanara now, because sure. Why not.

I liked the early books in this series a lot when I was younger, and I’m glad that I took the time to reread those and see how the sequels developed the characters further. But these last two novels are so thoroughly and utterly bad that I’m having trouble even reconciling them as being part of the same broad narrative at all.

This volume: ★☆☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 5 > 10 > 9 > 7 > 2 > 3 > 1 > 6 > 4 > 8 > 11 > 12

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