"Dungeon Academy: No Humans Allowed" by Madeline Roux

Don't bother.

I'm serious, just don't bother. You'd think the official product would be about on par with things like The Green Ember, but apparently not.

The crux of the problem is, I didn't care. This obviously-secretly-a-human girl? Nope, I have no opinion on whether or not she should get out alive, dead, with an arm cut off, driven insane, ANYTHING. Didn't care, couldn't have cared if I tried. Believe me, I did try.

And this right here is why I DNF'd this book and give it one star. Any of the main characters could die, and the status quo would be exactly the same without them   better, in some cases. Cooler people will prevail; I find it hard to imagine that a literal dragon would have trouble beating any of the villains (army of zombies? Incinerate.) Or the school's principal, a beholder; you can fly above whatever enemies and laser them to death.

 

My only theory as to why this happened is that the author tried to do your standard "ragtag band of misfits", but turned it up to 11 and had an uber-ragtag band of uber-misfits nobody would ever miss. It didn't help that three of the characters were jerks, three of them were whiny (I'll give the protagonist credit for that, she wasn't), and one of them just felt kind of flat. Really, all of them felt kind of flat, but that guy more than most.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T. It... would probably make a far better videogame than a book, but guess what? It's already a game. We call it Dungeons and Dragons, and it is waaaaaaaaaay more fun than this book was.