Being a gamer, this book, Epic by Conor Kostick, really captured an interested me. In this book, the society is revolved around the game, Epic. This game can decide if you go to universities, get supplies for your community, fulfill your dreams, and decides your social status. Erik’s adventure starts with him wondering why the government treats his parents terribly. This book includes many different adventures ranging from slaying the Red Dragon to intense battles with a corrupt government and finding out many secrets kept from the players of Epic. This book started off slow for me and in the middle of the book, the plot was harder to follow but the well described fight scenes kept me hooked onto the book.

The storyline is very creative and I believe that it is one of the best storylines for this generation. Our generation has been very hooked to video games and many people are searching for a book about a video game. Many people in our generation are looking for an adventure, and this is the perfect book for the people looking for adventure or video games. The book takes place in “New Earth” and in New Earth, violence is banned and everything is decided based on a video game. The game, Epic, is an MMORPG which stands for. massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The Government is  unjust and favors the strong. Most communities also believe this but no one is brave or strong enough to challenge the Central Allocations team, which is full of dangerous players with a lot of wealth and experience, but Erik and his family are tired of being treated like they don’t exist. Erik was able to encourage his father and friends to fight with him with the hopes to save his family or even the world. In this fight, he found out what his father was capable of. This battle made Erik question why his father stayed low with his abilities, and why the government treated his family like they did. In Erik’s adventure, he also finds out a “secret” in this game while he was preparing for the graduation tournament. The graduation tournament decides what you do in real life, like whether you go to college or not.

For this being Kostick’s first book, I feel like he is very skilled. I also believe that he can work on making the plot easier to follow for readers like myself, but with the storyline that he had come up with, I think that it would be challenging. Kostick does a great job at describing scenes and painting pictures into our head, for example, “To the west of the dolmen were the flags of the orc chieftain, thousands of their thickset, ugly bodies forming black rows all the way to the horizon. Camped right beside the leather-armored orcs were their hated rivals, green-skinned goblins, swarming throughout the fields, with a dozen large wooden catapults drawn up near the banners of their king. To the south, nearest the group’s hiding place in the fringes of forest, was a battalion of ogres. These savage giants had metal-plated armor across their torsos and shoulders; they wielded huge, two-handed, spiked clubs, which no human could hope to lift. Although there were only a hundred or so of these, they were more formidable opponents than the orcs and goblins combined.” -Kostick. I recommend reading this book if you are into adventure or games, whether it is for entertainment or if you just want a good book to bring you to a different reality.