The Wandering Inn
by
pirateaba
(this review contains a few mild spoilers)
Back in February, I was feeling a little bit down and low, and I asked for recommendations of something fun and lighthearted and easy to read. Among the many suggestions was a series called The Wandering Inn, which I’d heard mentioned before, and which seemed to be cheerful cozy fantasy. In other words, just what I needed.
At the time, I had no real grasp of what a web novel was, and I had no idea what I got myself into.
The short of it is that the story is being published, chapter by chapter, on the author’s website. The whole thing started in 2016, with chapters published every few days – except for when the author needs a break. These days, each chapter is between 10k and 50k words, and the total word count is above 12 million words.
By comparison, an average fantasy novel is maybe about 140k words (give or take).
To put it mildly, The Wandering Inn is a long story. It took me half a year to read it, and though I’m now caught up, I’m eagerly waiting for the next chapter to drop.
Okay, so it’s a long story, but what’s it about? Is it cozy and cheerful?
Yes, it’s cozy and cheerful, but it’s also dramatic, tragic, adventurous, and fantastic. In fact, it’s by far the most over-the-top fantastic fantasy I’ve read. The entire story is so full of cool stuff it has awesome-sauce coming out its ears. It’s as cozy as Legends & Latte, as epic as Malazan, and as fantastic as Warcraft.
Although, it begins rather humbly…
Our main character is Erin Solstice. She’s an ordinary young woman from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and during a late night trip to the bathroom, she finds herself transported to magical fantasy world.
The story begins with Erin stumbling into an old abandoned inn, after a harrowing experience including a dragon (or perhaps a wyvern), and a bunch of goblins trying to kill her. The inn is run down and dusty, and Erin tidies up a little before she falls to sleep at a table. When she wakes up, she’s a level 4 [Innkeeper].
Since Erin has no idea where she is or how to go back home, she decides to continue being an [Innkeeper] and get her inn up and running. Surely, someone will come around and want something to eat or drink – except Erin has nothing to serve, and she can’t cook, and there are monsters all around the inn that want to eat her. Complications ensue.
Eventually, guests show up, and while they’re not actually human, they’re nice enough, in their own way, and Erin starts to find her feet in the world.
Rather than go through the entire story, let’s say it includes the following, and then some:
- Erin tries to keep it secret that she’s from another world.
- Erin comes up with some crazy idea for her inn based on something from her world (pizza, hamburgers).
- Erin helps her friends get their shit together with varying degrees of success – including making things worse.
- Erin beats everyone in the entire world at chess.
- Monsters attack Erin’s Inn.
- Someone else from Earth shows up and they also try to keep it secret that they’re from another world.
- Local, national, and continental authorities try to take advantage of the knowledge held by the people from another world.
- War.
- Erin throws a party.
- Side characters across the world have adventures that may or may not affect Erin and her inn at some point.
- Horrible monsters try to kill everyone.
- Romance.
- Serious real-world issues (racism, loneliness, discrimination, police brutality, sex & sexuality, miscarriage, abuse of power – it does get pretty grim at times)
- Erin’s inn explodes.
- Magic. Lots and lots of magic.
There’s more, of course, and many of the things listed above keep coming back in various shapes and forms. It could get repetitive, but the world of the story is huge, and there are more point of view characters than you can shake a really large stick at, so there’s plenty of variety. It’s not all about Erin, even if she’s pretty central to… well… everything really.
But, you might wonder, if it’s such a long story, and there are new chapters every week, is it any good? Doesn’t the writing suffer?
There’s no denying that the writing is unpolished at times, but hardly enough to bring me out of the story. Rather, given that most of the chapters have little to no editing whatsoever (if I understand correctly), the author is doing a fantastic job getting their story out there. It’s the kind of writing that pulls you in and doesn’t let you go, despite the odd repetition or inelegant turn of phrase.
If your main reason for not checking out The Wandering Inn is a concern over the quality of the prose, you really should reconsider.
That said, I started with the audio book, and each part that’s released on Audio and on Kindle has been edited. Additionally, the narrator (Andrea Parsneu) is doing an absolutely fantastic job bringing Erin and her friends to life. I don’t know if she’s using voice filters or if she’s just that good, but it’s amazing either way. If you have the option, I strongly recommend you go with the audio version first. Then, if you, like me, can’t wait for the next book to be ready on audio, you can move on to reading the chapters on the website, and that’s fine too. The first five volumes of the book have been released as nine books on Amazon and Audible, and there are three and a half more volumes available on the author’s website.
Okay, but what’s this about levels? Is it LitRPG?
Yes, no, maybe. I don’t know.
The world of the Wandering Inn functions a little bit like a computer game or a tabletop RPG in that people have classes, level up, and gain skills. The skills can be mundane, like [Basic Cleaning] which makes you clean your inn a little faster, and they can be over the top amazing, like [Disable Friendly Fire] which allows a combat alchemist to throw explosive potions into a big group fight and not hurt their friends.
That’s about the extent of it, though. The skills and levels give their owners special abilities, but it’s more about doing cool stuff than about cleverly analyzing and combining game mechanics. It’s part of the charm of the story, in a way. For a while, I was worried about power-creep, and concerned that the main characters of the story would eventually get too awesome. It doesn’t seem to be an issue yet, though, and things are chugging along just fine.
As you might have guess, I have a lot of good to say about The Wandering Inn, but at the same time, it’s far from perfect.
What I’ll whine about
Erin. Our beloved heroine isn’t always the brightest, and she sometimes makes some very questionable decisions. Not in the way that a morally gray character is sometimes forced to make the wrong decisions, or someone without enough time to think makes a bad decision in a stressful situation, but in the way of someone who’s unable to see that their way isn’t the only way, or in the way of someone who can’t see that their actions might hurt other people.
Pacing. The overarching plot moves incredibly slow. This doesn’t mean that the individual chapters are slow, but it means that it takes a long time for big things to happen. Perhaps a bit like going out to get groceries, except you meet a friend on the way, and then you have to stop and look at a puppy, and maybe the streets blocked because of road works, and then your mom calls, and so on. You’ll get the groceries eventually, but there were so many other interesting things to see on the way, that you’re really hungry once you finally get home with the food.
Secrets. The author has an annoying tendency to keep important information from the reader in a way that gets very obvious after a time. It’s abundantly clear that something is in the works, characters very obviously don’t say anything about it, and the reader is intentionally kept in the dark. As I recall, it was more common early on, and less common in the more recent volumes, but it’s still nuisance.
What I’ll gush about
Erin. Despite what I was whining about above, Erin is still awesome and amazing. She’s funny, irreverent, and clever. She’s the kind of person you’d love to have as your friend, and her inn is the kind of place you’d like to visit for a few days (and then you’d need somewhere quiet to recover once you’re out of there).
Magic and fantasy. I can’t name another story I’ve read with as much over-the-top amazing magic. Even games like Dungeons & Dragons or World of Warcraft seem restrained by comparison. There’s magic everywhere, and while the average person isn’t amazingly powerful, magic and Skills allow ordinary people to perform supernatural feats. Running faster, jumping higher, or punching harder is just the beginning. Instantly repairing a broken chair, pausing time to think things over, or being able to flawlessly recall the lyrics of every song you’ve ever heard is the next step, and it just keeps going.
Mages don’t just throw fireballs, they call down entire meteor showers.
Scope. The world of The Wandering Inn is enormous, and the cast of characters is huge. It could be overwhelming, but the slow pace and the length of the story means that you have time to get to know all the people and all the places. The world and the characters within it become living, breathing people, and you keep rooting for them like they’re old friends of yours.
Spending so much time with these characters means you get to know them really well. It means that when things go off the rails (they often do), you don’t need a detailed explanation of what’s going on, and you can just let yourself get swept up in the story. It means that when two people talk for the first time, you don’t need to be told why one of them keeps blushing and stammering.
Final Words
This is the longest, most spectacularly fantastic cozy epic fantasy I’ve ever read.
