The Duchess of Hammers: 2nd Dive Begins

World Tree Online Series, Book 2

By: M.A. Carlson

Narrated by: Anneliese Rennie

Length: 17 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's summary

Bye-bye is back! Just a week since the 1st Dive came to an end, Bye-bye and his friends find themselves in Root City, a city built up around the World Tree itself. This sprawling metropolis is filled with potential and danger in equal measure.

Barely logged in and just starting to put plans in place for the month-long dive into the World Tree Online, they are quickly entangled in a quest with far-reaching consequences, should they fail. They are also in charge of ensuring Duchess of Hammerton survives the next week to make it home. Standing in their way is a love cult bound and determined to kidnap her. If that wasn’t enough, there are those who plot in the dark places hidden just under the surface of Root City.

Can Bye-bye and his friends survive the aptly nicknamed Duchess of Hammers and the trouble that follows her?

©2018 M.A. Carlson (P)2019 Spectrum Audiobooks

Not enough voice diversity

good book and plot, the narration is my problem with this book. I am heavily invested I the story and characters and I am waiting for more. having said that I'm having a hard time distinguishing between characters and their accents, the male mc sounds very wimpy and femine and I don't think he is supposed to come across as that. would like this book to be narrated with both female and male narrators to get better diversity and depth of characters.

As enjoyable as the first

If you liked the first you'll enjoy this. It's as simple as that, we're continuing the story and it's in no way a major departure from the last book, so more of the same goodness.

Good Characters and World Building

As with book 1, this installment excels with well developed major characters who feel real and you can get invested in. Sure, the aspects of romance are excessively juvenile, with adults acting like pre-teens experiencing their first crush, but that is honestly not an uncommon trope for the genre. Here we see a bit more fighting than the first book and an increasing number of forces at play in the world.

Narration has improved since book 1, most notably with more natural tone/pace when going over the crunchy bits. Definitely a good choice to move away from the simulated robot voice used for this in book 1.

FIXED (was: Recording corrupt)

Edit (Dec 20, 2019):
Audible fixed this by adding the missing chapters, so I’ve fixed my rating.
Note that the chapter numbers are still messed up in the app (goes from 13 to 17, but it is just the numbers shown, the correct chapters are there in the correct order).

Edit:
Confirmed by getting ebook, 3 Chapters missing from audio (14-16).

Original:
Gaps in story make me believe there is a problem with the recordings.

Mention of fight at sundry store, Keith dancing, and never seemed to do advanced spear training with tiger dude.

Every bit as good as The Curse of Hurling Ridge

I enjoyed listening to this LitRPG audiobook. The characters are all unique and have their own voices. It was enjoyable to watch Bye Bye's adventures. I actually enjoy that players have over-the-top names while NPCs have more realistic names. I like Bye Bye Jacko's class, he makes reading in-game literature sound fun.

My only real complaint is that the real world barely plays any role in the in-game story, it almost feels tacked on. Since almost all of the story takes place in-game, that doesn't bother me.

The narration was quite good, and Anneliese used different voices for different characters. There was a bit of a mix-up with the chapter order with audible, but that seems to have been resolved.

If you enjoyed The Curse of Hurling Ridge, you can't go wrong with The Duchess of Hammers.

looking forward to the next book

i really enjoyed the progression of this story and cant wait to see where it leads. im enjoying the character development and how the relationships are growing between the characters, hoping for one relationship in particular. i liked the outsiders view and how strong bye-byes tactics really make him amd his friends compared to the top players.

anneliese does a good job with the narration. i cant picture the voices being different then they are, specifically rose, shes done beautifully.

Love the story! The narrator,,,well,,,,

Loved both books in this series so far as I am a gamer and can relate to the story-line and characters. As far as narration goes, don't get me wrong Ms. Rennie has a very engaging voice when she is NOT trying to use an accent. The horrific English accents not to mention the cringe-worthy Scottish accents made me almost reach for the stop button. I am really hoping that if there is a book 3 and the same narrator is used, she will have taken some classes in language/speech elocution beforehand. I am really not trying to flame the narrator as i like her non-accented voice a lot, its just that her bad accents detract from the fun of the book.

Solid

In my mind, a five star book is one that you list to over and over again. I enjoy this series and my gripes are generally very low. I did end up reading this series digitally before buying the audible book so I guess I wasn't as excited to get ahold of it as the first time I read it. Still though, I find it to be a good series and I look forward to new content for it. I think I liked the first book a bit more than the second though offhand.There was nothing wrong with this book but it is kind of a two parter with this being the first half of what felt like a to be continued.

Good job, looking forward to more content.

Great book but...

When it takes ages for a audio book to release to continue the story. Great book but the long wait for the next story on my morning drive to work is a let down.

Great story, technical issue with release

Storyline is compelling.
The reading is well performed.
Whoever edited the release labeled chapter four as chapter five, despite the audio being correct. Since chapter four is missing from the TOC, that makes all subsequent chapters as <reality+1>.
Perhaps the producers can correct this and re-release it on Audible?