Oh My Gods! The Forgotten Maze: 04/22/22

Oh My Gods! The Forgotten Maze by Stephanie Cooke, Insha Fitzpatrick, and Juliana Moon (Illustrations) picks up where the last volume let off. Karen has settled into her new life at Mt Olympus and has been invited to write for the Chariot, the school news paper.

She wants to write about an online game she enjoys with her friends back home. But now a mysterious troll has started interrupting her gaming sessions. He goes by the moniker M1n0t4ur. As this volume is subtitled The Forgotten Maze, it's clear to the astute reader that he's probably at the high school too somewhere.

This volume is very focused on the game Karen and her friends enjoy and later on how it gets translated to a real world version. For readers who play online collaborative fighting games, they'll probably connect better with volume two than I did. I found the heavy reliance on the game a bit tedious at times.

My favorite character this volume is Arachne. I like her character design to give her a spider body but humanoid bust, head and arms. Mostly though I like how she does the lighting for the theater department and knows a thing or two about the world wide web (because, of course she would).

Like the first volume, The Forgotten Maze sits on the Road Narrative Spectrum. Both volumes sit far down on the spectrum, starting first with a family of travelers and now, moving onto privileged travelers (00) (as Karen is a demigod going to school with gods and demigods). Their destination is home (66), meaning finding their way out of the maze and finding the center of it. Their route their, though, is the labyrinth (99) as the person behind M1n0t4ur nerfed the maze to keep them relatively safe and because the journey through the maze helped Karen and her classmates become closer as friends. Thus thematically volume two is about privileged travelers going home via the labyrinth (006699).

Four stars

Comments (0)