Carl is chasing his ex-girlfriend’s show-winning Persian cat Princess Donut in the middle of the night when the apocalypse happens. One minute, he’s literally in a parking lot in his underwear and bare feet begging a cat to come down out of a tree. The next, Carl, who is still just in his undies and bare feet, and Princess Donut are just trying to survive a sadistic multi-level dungeon game show brought to the masses by their new alien overlords. Complications ensue.
A special thank you to Chelsea for recommending the book to me and to Jen for enthusiastically seconding the recommendation! It’s a highly entertaining and hilarious read.
I hesitate to include too many specific details about the plot or the game show since a big part of the fun for me as a reader was not having any heads-up on the wildly inventive characters or aspects of the game that Carl and Princess Donut are forced to play. Let’s just say it’s like Hunger Games meets Dungeons and Dragons meets the Roman Coliseum. It’s action-packed, though not for the squeamish.
The book is a LitRPG, which is a genre that combines facets of fantasy and science fiction with role playing games (RPGs). If you do not like RPGS or computer games, this book may not be for you. However, if you do like them or you just enjoy comedic science fantasy in general, then this book is exactly for you!
One of the great strengths of the book is the Carl-Princess Donut alliance and the absurdly funny and often touching dynamic between them. In fact, in general, it can be hard tonally for authors to balance humor with seriously dark themes, but Dinniman does it well here. It is laugh-out-loud funny throughout while also probing contemporary issues like artificial intelligence, social media, reality TV (and more) in a disturbing dystopian setting.
And if you fall in love with Carl and Princess Donut, you’re in luck because there are currently 7 more books in the series, all of which we have in the system. Dinniman has said he intends to wrap it up after a 9th book broken into 2 installments.
Recommended for fans of Andy Weir, Martha Wells, Travis Baldree, Ernest Cline, Brandon Sanderson, and Andrew Rowe.
*Ebooks for all books of the series are also available on Libby/OverDrive.
Have you read Dungeon Crawler Carl? Do you like gaming? Tell us in the comments! As always, please follow this link to our online library catalog for more information on this book or to place it on hold.
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