Virgil's Fire

A Portal Fantasy LitRPG (Dr. Druid, Book 2)

By: Maxwell Farmer

Narrated by: Daniel Wisniewski, Jessica Threet

Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

The kingdom sees a criminal. The demons, a meal. Virgil only sees results.

Dr. Druid and his team have been succeeding thanks to their quick thinking, excellent teamwork, and more than a little luck. Their efforts to keep the innocent safe and locate the next Demon General are starting to bear fruit. If his information is correct, they'll tackle the demon threat on their own terms.

Their goals lead them to journey deeper in the Yggdra Timberland, a great place for a druid to practice staying alive even when being attacked from all sides at all hours. Hope, growing power, and some pyromaniac orcs leads Virgil to believe that they're on the right track. All they need to do is periodically punch people that should be on their side, decimate the demons, and cull a couple crazed cultists.

He's gonna need more than a syringe to put these monsters to sleep.

©2022 Maxwell Farmer (P)2022 Mountaindale Press

Dr Druid strikes again

Virgil and Gwen are on the run from the racist king wanting to imprison him and execute his pets. As they seek a safe area to set up, they learn about demon incursions into the area and a homicidal tribe of orcs. There is no way that they can sit this threat out.

First off, I love that there is both a male and female narrator! Daniel Wisniewski and Jessica Threet do an amazing job. I was having some Battleborne flashbacks at times. The story progresses nicely and there is obvious chemistry between the characters. It’s great to see a character that actually try’s to clean up their quest log. The action scenes are intense. There is one of my favorite shout outs in this book. Spoiler at the end has me very excited for book 3!

Content warning: Language

I struggled not to give this 3 stars.

But I felt that it would be unfair to the author who wrote a fairly engaging story. This is one of those audiobooks that is much more at the mercy of the narrator’s interpretation than most. The delivery of a lot of the lines determines whether the jokes are terrible but a little funny or just terrible.

With a narrator who possesses even a glimmer of subtlety, the cheesier parts of the dialog and narrative could have been ameliorated. Since Daniel Wisniewski has never read a sentence that he couldn’t over-dramatize that opportunity was missed. Instead we are sadly forced to slog through this book constantly being pulled out of the story by the narrator’s off-putting Shatner-esque pauses, heavily sauced with his “In a world…” movie trailer tone.

It’s baffling. It doesn’t matter what the words are saying. He reads an establishing paragraph about the setting with the same foreboding gravitas that he does the climax of a boss-fight. And he does this with almost every book he narrates.

This is another reason I decided not to penalize this book… because I damn well knew what I was getting into. And at this point it’s ridiculous to hope that DW will actually improve his craft.

In closing I wish that Mr Wisniewski would start a new company with Wayne Mitchell that only supplies narration for all the weird, nekked-chesty-Manimal, beastiality porn aimed at female shut-ins, and the faux-fantasy, almost-nekked-chesty-teenaged-girl porn aimed at 40-year-old virgins that seems to be 85% of the SciFi and Fantasy books getting released on audible these days… so that I could easily avoid having to listen to another book narrated by either of those high-school, drama club, thespian, wannabes ever again.

Mic drop.

Wonderful book

I love the Easter eggs to other books like Jackson from the completionest Chronicles really enjoying the story so far kinda reminds me of rising of the shield hero

Awesome

This series was everything I was expecting and more!!!. I loved this new addition. The way Daniel narrates the story and gives the narration an emotion that alot of narrators can't is crazy. The fighting and detail into this book is also good, even with basically no fighting abilities Dr druid is kicking butt on the battlefield. his new arm was a good add on to. there were really no cons in this book, it was way better than the 1st book and Gwen earned my trust. the other druid not so much, I also feel like he should've leveled up more with all the fighting in this one. Dr druid was also on some menace stuff at the end of the series ( I don't know if it's just me but I like mcs with backbone and that don't take crap from others.) Dude was straight insulting the Demon at the end of the book. I loved the character progression in this series, Gwen and virgils ship got better and he got stronger, his mental strength and the way he looked at perspectives got way better. this addition was exquisite, if you have a credit and you don't know whether to get this 2nd book or another one get this one. Virgil was a beast in this series and he'll be a beast in the 3rd addition.

Good book

I believe this book is a good continuation of this series. The characters show remarkable growth. The story has progressed exceptionally well. So I think that listeners should invest in this story they won’t be disappointed.

Better

This was better than first book. Story progression was great and Virgil definitely has character growth. Would love to see some from other Druids because they all seem very one dimensional now. Still copies Rising of the Shield Hero, like scene with seeds and plants evil.
Narrorators/editing was let down on this one. Reason I marked it down. You could hear Jessica inhaling when she had to speak. Narrorator voice would be talking then all of sudden voice sounded different, like further away from mic, then back to normal.