Heretical Fishing 4

Read Time: 2 Minutes

Heretical Fishing 4 kicks off with a recap that’s as rambling as it is useful. This, as it turns out, sets the tone for the whole book. Almost 23 hours long, and I spent the first 18 or more chapters waiting for something to happen. Instead, Fischer mostly strolls around while everyone else has awakenings, breakthroughs, or other generic “fantasy world bullshit” as he’d put it.

There’s coffee made with magical beans, lovingly described meals, people pulling pranks (soooo many pranks and gotcha’s and just kidding’s and pretending to be mad… for the love of everything give it a rest already) and a lot of saccharine-level sweetness between characters. It’s fluff piled on fluff. Sure, there are hints of something ominous brewing, but the sheer amount of filler buries it.

Fischer himself has been elevated to basically god mode. He teleports at will, basically able to move his massive boat, his entourage of cultivators and spirit animals, and his own massive self-importance across the map, and knows what’s coming and how to defeat it before it even lands. It’s hard to feel any stakes when the protagonist is this untouchable. Even the so-called big bads don’t register as a real threat.

So much time is spent on describing other characters’ awakenings, some of whom (quite frankly) we barely know or care about that the book feels padded beyond reason. Honestly, it could have been cut down by half (or more) without losing a thing.

I liked the first three books in the series for their offbeat humour and cozy weirdness, but Book 4 just meanders. It’s a big nothing burger (bonus food joke!)… no stakes, no tension, no real sense that anything might go wrong. By the end, I was mostly wondering whether it was time to set this series aside. Now, having had a little time to reflect, right now I still can’t see myself going further.

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