Absolutely true fact: I only bought this book because of my inner magpie. I have the Broken Binding version, which has the same cover but also has matching purple/pink sprayed edges, and for whatever reason I am an absolute whore for that color. I have two of Django Wexler’s books; Goodreads tells me I enjoyed The Thousand Names and The Shadow Throne when I read them in 2013 and 2014, but for some reason that is entirely lost to the mists of time I never picked up the third volume, and I haven’t read anything of his since. Well, I’m going to have to add Thousand Names to my second chances project next year, because I stayed home from work again this afternoon and I read this damn thing cover-to-cover in more or less a single sitting.

I am not exactly sure what a “progression fantasy” is, if I’m being honest, or how much such a thing overlaps with a LitRPG; this book calls itself a progression fantasy and Matt Dinniman blurbs it on the cover, but it doesn’t have the emphasis on video game/RPG mechanics like leveling and ability scores that LitRPGs have. Wexler himself calls it “Pokémon with robots,” which … isn’t entirely wrong, but there’s a lot more going on than what you might think from that description.

At any rate: the main character is Taj, a young scrapper who lives in a slum literally built among the remnants of an underground junk heap. The surface is kilometers away, and occasionally showers of metal or giant objects fall from the sky and kill people. Taj turns out to be talented with … well, not quite robotics, as sigilcraft is an interesting combination of magic and technology that doesn’t quite line up perfectly with “robots,” but it’s close enough for this piece and you can see from the cover that there’s clearly something mechanical running around with him. At any rate, his robot is named Star, and because of a particular sigil Taj discovered, Star can both communicate mentally with Taj and to all appearances appears to be sentient. Taj supplements scrapping with occasional petty thievery, and one night he sneaks up to a higher (and thus wealthier) level of the giant pit he lives in and robs a young woman named Ky. Ky takes one look at Star and offers him a better deal: she’ll bankroll him into a tournament for combat versions of these robots in return for his help with some shit she has going on, and we’re off to the races.

So the Pokémon angle is the fighting robots, mixed with a heist novel, a closed-off postapocalyptic society reminiscent of Dust or Fallout, a magic sigil system that reminds me of the tech in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders Trilogy, and some great character work. I like Ky and Taj a lot, and Taj’s semi-adopted found family and the menagerie of fixers, gamblers, gangsters and aristocratic degenerates they encounter throughout the book are uniformly fun, as are the little glimpses of society aboveground you get here and there. My only real complaint is that the book could have used a little bit more breathing room, although as long as the books I’ve been reading lately have been, it was nice to sit down and blast through something short. There are a few questions that I assume are going to be dealt with in sequels– Taj is awfully good with sigilcraft, and everyone he encounters expresses disbelief that he’s been able to cobble Star together with essentially scavenged parts, and then there’s Star’s apparent sentience, which is kept a secret from most of the other characters throughout the book. Revelations are coming, I’m sure.

Definitely worth giving a look, and then give it a prominent place on your shelf so you can enjoy the pretty colors.