Review: Quests and Quandaries by Alda Yuan

Quests and Quandaries 
By Alda Yuan 
Publication Date: December 16^th 2018 
Publisher: N/A 
Find This Book: Quests and Quandaries
Rating: 3.5/5 




I was given a copy of this book by the author in exchange for an honest review. 

In this case, definitely don't judge a book by its cover! Alda Yuan's self published book Quests and Quandaries holds a treasure trove of fantasy tropes just waiting to be poked fun at, which a nice philosophical thought process about how much control the characters (and perhaps the readers themselves) have over their own lives. 

I really like the sort of self aware, satirical angle this book took. It was refreshing to see a character acknowledging how things turn out a specific way, because that's how quests and epics always go in the stories! The characters and different lands were lots of fun as well. I particularly enjoyed when Rahni watched how her world came to be (a beetle created her land, and the world is suspended by wires). Cementing a mythological story as "truth" was very cool.

The only thing I didn't enjoy was all the footnotes. There were 324 footnotes and they're very hard to open and read on a kindle device. I was curious to what they contained, so I read them all. Unfortunately, only about 10% actually answered a question a reader might have in the relevant scene. Most of the footnotes did not add anything to the story, and some of them even confused me more by mentioning characters not in the book! Furthermore, it would have been nice if the 4 rules *were* footnoted whenever they were mentioned, but they were not important enough to get footnotes I guess. The rules are read once towards the beginning, and rule #4 isn't brought up again until the end. I had no clue what the rule was by then!

That being said, the footnotes only brought this book down by one star. It's still a hilarious fantasy book that I would recommend to those who don't take their tropes and cliches too seriously.