The Renegades

Bard from Barliona, Book 1

By: Vasily Mahanenko, Eugenia Dmitrieva, Boris Smirnov - translator

Narrated by: Andrea Emmes

Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

Barliona is back! Old world, new heroes!

What would happen if a professional rock musician joined a virtual MMO in search of inspiration among its game world? What would happen if she decided to play as a biota bard, a brand-new race of humanoid flora as well as a new class?

Whatever would happen, it would surely be fun....

©2018 Eugenia Dmitrieva and Vasily Mahanenko; English translation copyright 2018 by Boris Smirnov (P)2018 Tantor

Could’ve made her listen to the main story first

Between the butchering of names and other things the narrator kinda made this hard listing i almost ended it several times gonna hot the seeing one up just because i like the world created by the author hopefully she gets better

love Barliona

This is an excellent continuation of a series. I've only ever enjoyed. I'm thrilled to get to see more of the story from a different perspective.

I likes this book a lot.

Awesome book grate continue to the shaman series. I different perspective of the shadow kingdoms created. Can’t wait to see what happens.

Good Story, but bad name pronunciation

If you are going to have a spinoff series with a different narrator you should have the sound editor check to make sure that the main characters names from the main series arent butchered. *Face Plant*

ending

cliff hangers needed another hour to finish out the story. over all a well written story

To band together with music

I loved the idea of a band going into virtual reality to get ideas for songs for that game. My favorite part was the meeting of the main character and the military man, one is a gamer, the other is not. This duo makes this book easy to understand from two points of view.

Name changes?

She keeps saying Jaranika not Garanika. When she said melon for Mayen I was very upset and when she miss pronounce their names it through all amersion out the window. Other than that the book is really good.

Slow start to series

It feels like a very slow start with a rushed ending to me. Going to need to relisten to The Way of the Shaman to remember what was going on. I understand why I kept seeing unfavorable reviews for this book. If you haven’t read and liked Way of the Shaman don’t bother with this one. I think this is just an intro to this new spinoff from that series.

I have hope...

The book reads like an unbroken string of one-liners connected together to try and narrate a story. It loosely feels like the Shaman series, but the constant barrage of one-liners seems like the author's attempt at creating witty, well-read characters. Instead, however, it's just incredibly distracting and makes the narrative hard to follow. If you filter that out, though, the characters are still likeable and the plot arc is interesting (if less so than the Shaman series). Thus, I have hope for the rest of the series.

Much more Casual than Way of the Shaman

5 stars for returning to the world of Barliona, but 4 stars for the story. I enjoyed the writing and pacing of the book, but it didn't have nearly as much conflict or urgency as the original series "Way of the Shaman". The characters are casual players and clearly not invested long term in the world of Barliona. This makes it very hard to want to stick with the story long term over multiple novels. As a stand alone story, this is a sold 4 star novel. As a series, I haven't moved on to the second book and may not pick it up for some time.