 I know that some of you were probably looking forward to me reading Warbreaker Next, but I've recently gotten a couple other books here that I want to just add to the pile, so I'm not waiting on them forever. So at the top here we got Doppelgangster, under that we have The Name of the Wind, and then we have How Few Remain, which I know I did a video on the World Building for that, and I have read it before. I just want to read it again before I do a review of it. So with all that being said, let's roll this fucking die. So that is A7, so next I will be reviewing Doppelgangster. This is the introduction song, it's not very good, but it's not too long. Okay there is a scene near the end of Doppelgangster, where the main character Esther beats an evil sorcerer using a dead chicken. I'm not making that up. She picks up a dead chicken, starts hitting him with it, and they spend several paragraphs describing it. And as fucking hilarious as that is, that tells you just about everything you need to know about this book I think. Really I mean it. This book is very light-hearted, very cheesy, very stupid at times, it doesn't take itself too seriously, and it really knows that it's cheesy and stupid and it just has fun with it. The plot of this book is that there is an actress slash waitress named Esther Diamond, a name so aggressively Jewish that it seems mildly anti-Semitic, but whatever, we'll leave that alone. And she, oh yeah, apparently this book is actually a sequel to another one, I didn't know about that to begin with, but it does a pretty good job of explaining the plot of the first one. And so Esther is already familiar with like, okay there's secret supernatural stuff going on in the world, so when it starts going on in the story it's not really a surprise to her, but anyways she is working at a restaurant which is frequented by mobsters, by mafia members, and one night one of them claims that he saw his doppelganger, he claims he saw someone that looked exactly like him in every way, and he thinks that that's an omen of death, so he's freaking out and she tries to calm him down, but then he immediately dies, gets killed. And the police can't figure out who did it, the scene looks really weird, and so Esther immediately suspects magic is involved, and so she starts investigating and I don't want to give away any more than that because the mystery of this story is one of the genuinely good parts of it, like, well I mean there's a lot of genuinely good parts of this, but I mean the mystery is something that you can take actually seriously and be really invested in and not really know what's going on until the very end, so I don't want to give away too much about that. So the thing that really just makes this book though are the characters because I mean they're all, they're all great, there's not a single character in here that I hated, even the villain, when you find out who they are, I did feel sympathy for them, like I could kind of see where they were coming from, I could see why they were doing the things they were doing, I still thought they were evil, but I didn't feel like, okay, I didn't feel like they were pure evil or that they were just doing this for power or anything like that, and beyond that all the characters are just a hell of a lot of fun. Esther herself is kind of the straight man in the story, like she's not particularly silly, she doesn't have a particularly over-the-top personality or anything like that, but she does have some pretty sarcastic and snarky narration, she does occasionally say some funny lines, like she's pretty great, and she, you can tell she does or she is a genuinely good person because she's trying to stop a mob war from going on, she's trying to prevent more people from being killed, so it's not like she's someone that just felt like she was getting dragged into this, she does seem like a genuinely decent human being. Then there's her wizard friend named Max, and he's this centuries-old wizard who is supposed to protect New York from evil, and his lack of understanding about the modern world is pretty funny, and his weird vocabulary, his weird way of describing things is also pretty funny. I mean he's just a lot of fun, and then there's multiple mobster characters, the most prominent of which is this old hitman named Lucky who is Esther's friend, and he accompanies her throughout the majority of this book, so he's the most prominent mobster character, but the thing is that almost all of them are just such over-the-top, like shitty gangster movies, Godfather Goodfellas stereotypes that, I mean, they're just hilarious to watch. I mean, they switch into Italian every couple of sentences, they say just stupid shit that people don't actually talk like, like, it's very obviously tongue-in-cheek, the author is very clearly just having fun with this whole thing, and so the gangster characters, I mean, they're just fun to watch, or fun to read about, I should say, but the point is, they're fun. The last character of note is Esther's boyfriend who is a cop named Detective Lopez, and he, he's not that great, actually, but I did kind of enjoy seeing his relationship with Esther, because the thing is, they do have some genuine chemistry, and they do seem to actually like each other, however, the thing is that life just continually gets in the way for them, and so as you're reading, you do really get the feeling that, okay, yeah, this isn't gonna work out for them, but at the same time, you feel kind of bad for them for that happening, because they both seem like, they both seem like decent people, but yeah, I'd be lying if I said Lopez was my favorite character, or that he was particularly funny, but you know, he was fine, he was there, he was, he was alright. I don't think there's much else to say about this book, though, I mean, like I said, the plot is mostly just them solving the mystery, and it is a genuinely good mystery, so if you're into that sort of thing, I can definitely recommend this, and if you're into just like sort of lighthearted tongue-in-cheek sort of thriller adventure type stories, then you'll probably really enjoy this, because like I said, it's genuinely funny, and it's not just the absurdity of some of the situations, like some of the characters, again, they're also absurd, but they also do have some fun quips and jokes that they tell to each other, so overall, yeah, I can give this a solid recommendation, it's a good way to start my year off. Please subscribe. I know that seems greedy considering how many I already have, but you know, I could always use more.