Threadbare was a fantastic little book. It’s a LitRPG with some serious gaming mechanics crossed over with comedic fantasy, and I really enjoyed reading it. The main character, Threadbare, is a teddy bear turned golem. He starts off at level 1 with incredibly low intelligence, unable to read or understand human speech. As he experiences more things his stats increase and he begins to comprehend more.
I found this method of character development to be quite intriguing and unique. I’ve not read many LitRPGs and definitely none with this level of RPG components in it. Threadbare develops skills and classes the same way you would in a video game; for example, early on while his intelligence is low and he’s only been alive for a couple of hours:
He was amazed to find out that hey, you could bend your legs when you walked! That was a pretty novel idea!
INT +1
It is a fairly unique way of developing characters and I really enjoyed the obvious points of growth.
Threadbare as a whole is also quite comedic. As you can probably imagine, quite a lot of trouble ensues when you have a small animated teddy bear with no intelligence running amok. The story starts off with him fighting the cat, Pulsivar. I never expected to find a teddy bear and a cat fighting each other so engrossing. I really shouldn’t have been surprised that I found it humorous, though.
A lot of the early sections of the book are based on Threadbare learning about his environment and how a multitude of misunderstandings makes him enemies with the cat and makes him the loyal follower of his creator’s little girl, Celia. Their relationship is really awesome, and it’s amazing to see little Theadbare, the 12 inch tall teddy bear, standing up to defend her.
Pulisvar also makes frequent appearances. He has a stereotypically cat-like attitude. He is “twenty-five pounds of the gods’ perfect killing machine” and nothing bad that happens is ever his fault. Nope, he was definitely not involved.
There is a plot to the book too. It takes a little while for it to start, and wasn’t really what held my attention throughout the story. The real strong points are the humour and characters throughout the book.
Cuteness and humour abound, and it’s a fantastic quick read. I devoured it in two sittings and probably would’ve done it in one if I didn’t have to sleep before work the next day.
Audience
This book is probably best for people who like:
- Comedic Fantasy
- LitRPG
- Non-human characters
- Fast-paced
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