 I have, like, six hairs that keep falling in front of my face no matter how many times I pull them aside. I don't think it shows up on camera, though. Alright, so you all know the drill by this point. This book was both written and requested by Mel Austin. It's called The Path of Wim. And... I didn't hate it. There is a lot of room for improvement, though. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. This is a pretty basic fantasy road trip-style story that doesn't really do anything new, and it doesn't really do anything that it does particularly spectacularly either, so... Yeah, like, obviously I'm going to be going into more detail on all that, but my overall thoughts are just like, yeah, that was, uh... That could have been a lot worse. So, the story here is about this guy named Petrovich, who is a deformed priest who lives out in this temple, kind of on the outskirts of his town. One day this woman named Rafena, or Rafina, not sure how to say that precisely, winds up in his care. She's in some pretty serious trouble, and he winds up agreeing to escort her to somewhere safe for her, which is far away. And from there, the story unfolds, and that's... there's not a whole lot else to it. Like, you've probably seen something similar to this somewhere before. You know, an older, stronger character escorts a younger, less experienced, weaker character who would be in trouble on their own to some destination for some greater purpose. And, well, there's... like I said, there's just not much else to it there. You know, and it's not done particularly well, so... I mean, there's nothing in here that's spectacularly bad, certainly. In fact, there's not a whole lot of stuff that I can complain about, per se. It's just most of what's here didn't connect with me that much. Like, basically, a story consists of, you know, three elements. Plot, setting, and character. And all three of those in this book were competent. You know, that's it. Like, the plot is competent. There are a few little twists and turns throughout there, but really nothing that I couldn't see coming, or even if I didn't see it coming, it wasn't that big of a deal. The setting, while there are a few unique bits, it never really escapes from that archetype of pseudo-medieval Europe. Like, there are a few bits which are a little unique, but the world never goes into that much detail on how it works, and what it's like, and what it's like for the people living there, and that sort of thing, so it doesn't really stand out there, either. Characters are mostly the same except for Petrovich, because I would say Petrovich is an above-average character. Not an amazing character, unfortunately, but he is definitely above-average, because you can tell that he's a very kind person. You can tell he takes his religion and his oaths very, very seriously, but you can also tell he's getting attached to Ravenna. He is a very good fighter, you know, as a monk, he was trained to be one, and he's extremely good at it, but he's not, like, going to tear through armies by himself or anything. He's just a guy who is good at fighting. You know, there's no magic or anything involved with that, so that was neat. And I think that this is pretty clearly the beginning of a series, so as time goes on, he might get developed and become even better, but as it stands now, like, yeah, he's just above-average, and every other character in here is serviceable. You know, they never develop beyond the archetype that they are when they start off. Like, Ravenna never really develops beyond the archetype of the girl who's in trouble and needs help and also has some stuff that she's hiding from the main character. She never goes beyond that, unfortunately. And you know what, going back to the world-building for a moment, I was going to set this aside, but honestly, it just keeps nagging at me. A lot of it, especially in terms of names, is just odd. Like, in fact, really just names are odd, because, like, sometimes you'll have people with names that sound vaguely Japanese, but they're supposed to be from the same culture as people who have names that sound vaguely Germanic or vaguely English or vaguely Slavic in the case of Petrovic, and that's just odd. And then you also have one of the main countries involved in the story. He's called Normaland, which feels like a weird mash-up of Normandy and the Netherlands, and the people from it are called Normani, which feels like a weird mash-up of Normans and Romani. And something tells me neither of those groups would be happy being associated with the other. And there's also a city which is just called Ottawa, like, just straight up, like, the city in Canada. And I mean, like, it's okay to take a real-life location and tweak the name a bit in order to make it a fantasy name, but like, you have to tweak it a little bit. I mean, that's not a huge problem or anything, but it did irk me, and I felt the need to bring it up here. Another, and actually really the only real issue I had with this book is that the prose is not great. Like, at times it's fine. In fact, for most of the book it's fine, and at times it does get a little better. Like, there are moments where the narrator goes into like metaphors and stuff to describe the current situation, and I think if there had been more of those, it would have been a better time reading. But honestly, there are a lot of points where characters are having a conversation and it'll just go, he said this, she said this, he walked over to the door, she followed, he said this, she said that. And like, it doesn't fall into the trap of just having nothing but dialogue. Like, there are some actions punctuating things which helps, but at the same time it keeps forgetting to tell us what the character's names are. And so if you missed it before it started or if you just lose track somewhere in the middle because there's more than two characters involved, then you, well, which did happen to me once or twice, then you could easily forget who's talking. And that's, well that's never a good thing. It could use some work. And on that note, if somebody edited this, they didn't do a very good job because in the last couple of chapters, or I think they did an alright job for most of the book, but in the last couple of chapters I did start noticing a few spelling errors so maybe they just got lazy there. Or spelling and grammatical errors, I should say. Like, there are points where sentences start with lowercase letters and stuff like that, which just like, basic issues. I didn't have difficulty understanding what was going on or anything, but like, very basic problems that should be fixed. And beyond that, this book I think ended a bit too soon because it's not that long. It's only a little over 300 pages. And it's definitely setting up for a sequel, sure. But the thing about setting things up for sequels is that you want to be careful not to fall into the trap of giving your audience half a story. Like, a lot of, I don't know why my mind is going here, but a lot of really crappy young adult books that came out like 10 years ago fell into that trap. Like, especially Hunger Games Clones. Like, they would have, the first book would be like half a story and so you wouldn't really have a climax in there. You wouldn't really feel like anything had been accomplished. You wouldn't feel like there had been that much progression. And this book doesn't quite fall into that trap. Like, it does feel like there's progression. It does feel like Petrovich has changed as a person. And it does feel like the journey he went on with Refena did change not only themselves, but also the world where there was some, well, again, there's progression there. You know, so that wasn't too awful. It really wasn't, but it does have elements of that. Well, if you want to know what happens next, read the sequel. And, well, that's about it. Yeah, I don't have a whole lot of specific thoughts on here because as I said, most of the stuff in here is perfectly competent. You know, it's like very average in most ways. Like, nothing about it stands out that much or very few things about it stand out that much, either good or bad. And most of the stuff in there that stands out, I think stands out in a good way. And really by that, I mean Petrovich's character, I think just tweak that a little or he'll even just have him develop more in later books in the series and he might turn out to be amazing. But as it stands, he is just an above-average character in a aggressively average story. And I don't really have much else to add. If you want stuff like early access to my videos or just voting on future video topics, then consider sending me money. And if you don't want to do that, then become a YouTube channel member or just like this video, share it around and stuff. It really does help. And that's about everything I'm supposed to say here, so I'll see you later. Bye.