Fae and Fare – Pirateaba

The second Wandering-Inn ebook collects volume two of the online serialization. I’m not going to recap the background: Either you’ve been following the web novel - which is up to volume six - and don’t need it, or you read the first ebook - which came out a year ago - and you don’t need it. (Or you’re considering starting reading at volume two, a thousand-plus pages into the story, in which case please accept instead a suggestion that you start at the beginning instead.)

Volume one focused, properly, upon the two main characters and most of it had a narrow geographic scope as well. In volume two the story gets bigger. There are six continent-scale or world-scale menaces. By the end of volume two all of them are just beginning to reawaken.

The cast becomes more interesting. In the first volume the secondary characters have minor supporting roles; in the second volume, some of them start to shine. The most-interesting of these are not the ones I would have expected:

• Rags. She decides that the only way for her tribe to survive is to start fighting smarter.
• Toren. As the animated skeleton keeps leveling, it acquires more and more of a personality.
• Klbkch. This Antinium is turning out to be less and less ant-like.

At 1600 printed-page-equivalents, this volume was too long to be read at one sitting, but it was fun, and I came close.