Skip School, Make Dragons

By: Richard Roberts

Narrated by: Beau Soleil

Artifact Forge doesn't make monsters. She's a bioengineer. She creates exotic magical livestock, upgrades cats into witches' familiars, and can turn you into a goblin if you accept the risks.

She's also thirteen, and has arrived in Goblita to learn her uncle is dead, she's inherited his business, and has a demonic cousin her age. Don't worry, Artifact can handle it. She's a prodigy! Give her a bioengineering challenge and she'll make you something better than you wanted.

…which is the problem as her messenger dragon turns into a ravening chimera, her new cousin gets her involved in a burglary, and the kids at school drag her into their dungeon crawling hobby.

With all that plus running a business and household like an adult, will Artifact have time to actually attend classes? Ask her again after she saves the city from the disasters she caused.

©2024 Richard Roberts (P)2025 David N. Wilson

overall a bit disappointing

I have loved Richard Roberts other books. Recommend them to others, I've even reread some after listening to them. I usually always leave glowing reviews.

Something feels really off about this book. I'm really not 100% sure what. My gut tells me it is maybe AI assisted?

The pacing is weird. the narrative peaks multiple times as if it is wrapping up, but just keeps going. Vibe is kind of like it was originally intended to be maybe 3 different books. Maybe fed an outline of a series into a LLM and pieces together what it spit out?

Could have really fleshed out the between parts a bit more. We are constantly introduced to characters that are immediately ride or die for the MC. Again really leaning into an impression that this was meant to be something bigger originally.

The tone and general plot comes off like a Bad Penny AU fanfiction. You could almost line up a lot of the characters with their Please Don't Tell my Parents counterparts. Like matching up Hyrule counterparts in Termina. Maybe Roberts is just trying to recapture the vibe that made his big series a success?

The reading also had some weirdness. It's a bit sped up in some parts. Initially the second or third chapter was completely sped up to a point I could hardly follow it so I waited a couple of weeks and reinstalled to see if it got fixed. (I had reinstalled initially thinking it must be me). it did get corrected. But the issue persisted elsewhere in the book. I think the editing of the audio is using that dead air audio clean up that people use for a lot of audio editing. But the sensitivity is dialed up too high or something, maybe tweaked inconsistently? maybe this is also AI assisted?