Cinnamon bun adventure time
And anybody who can repeatedly read out "Beavercleaver" without dissolving into giggles (get your minds out of the gutter, it's the name of an airship) has my deepest respect. She brings the whole crazy game-world to life (though I'm especially partial to her dragon voicings). Reba Buhr is a perfectly wonderful narrator. The world of Broccoli's quests is richly sensory, and the characters with whom she interacts are as quirky as might be expected from a teen fantasy, but every now and then we glimpse a depth of real life pain, real life knowledge. There are two intertwined "Bildungsroman" story arcs: Broccoli's development of diplomatic/combat skills to productively channel her essential pacifism in a (by definition, as it seems that gaming in general provides an arena for fantasies of violent takeover) violent world under threat of war, and Broccoli's adventures in friendship, as she assembles an inner circle (on the D'Artagnan & 3 Musketeers model) of intimates who are equally caught up in the evolution into adulthood. This paragon goes by the gamer-name of Broccoli Bunch, and the game she's drawn into is one for which she does not know the rules: for the non-gamer reader much of the fun is in learning the game along with the Bun-including a gradual discovery of what a Bun might be. At one point you’ll need to capture a fart in a bag in order to make the character Cinnamon Bun a sentient, er, cinnamon bun laugh so hard that he’ll fall off a bridge. The MC and narrator persona is a teenaged Canadian girl-a brave, smart, kind-hearted Cinnamon Bun in the sweetest sense of the term, but with sly intimations of a budding sexual maturation linked to her maturation as a disruptive player in a world where her decency and moral courage are very much the exception. This extremely well-written mashup of fantasy scenarios (Alice in Wonderland provides a thematic framework, but the far-flung allusions include the Underground Railroad, the destruction of the Amazon, steampunk early industrial societies, and much else along with the more expected dragon, pirate and princess pre-modern fantasies, and shoutouts to Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame).
![cinnamon bun adventure time cinnamon bun adventure time](https://adventuretimereviewed.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/bb-2.png)
My review is for all 3 volumes-at first the story seems to meander but in fact its ambitous structure and serious moral purpose emerge more sharply with every random-seeming adventure. I'm definitely not the intended reader (that is, not a juvenile well-versed in the rules of gaming and in litRPG tropes), but have tremendously enjoyed this paradoxically sweet-tempered (and thoughtful) take on the inherent violence and un-PC exoticism of the gamer's world of quests, magical self-augmentation and scavenging for loot. A gamer fantasy for and about kids growing into adults