Blog Tour Review - Perception Check by Astrid Knight

 Blog Tour Review - Perception Check by Astrid Knight

Her favorite tabletop roleplaying game is real, and her kidnapped childhood best friend is trapped in a far off land. Will she be able to save her? Let's roll initiative!

Violet Spence wants nothing more than to have a normal life. After witnessing her childhood best friend get abducted by monsters, that’s easier said than done. At twenty-three years old, Violet cannot seem to move past that fateful night ten years ago. Her only solace is Mages of Velmyra, a tabletop roleplaying game filled with goblins, fairies, and all-powerful magicians. But of course, that’s all fantasy.

Or, so she thought. As it turns out, the land of Velmyra is very real and the home of the monsters that took her best friend.

With the help of her friends (and the creator of the game itself), Violet must navigate the once-fictional creatures and powerful mages of Velmyra to retrieve a set of ancient relics—all in the hopes that the journey will lead her back to her friend. But for Violet, fighting monsters and magic workers doesn’t seem nearly as terrifying as confronting her own demons. And she’ll soon realize fighting the battle within herself can be just as tough as those fought against demigods.

As a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan, I was really looking forward to reading Perception Check. It certainly proved to be a very interesting and imaginative take on the genre!

There's a lot of portal fantasy out there, where people from "our world" cross over into a fantasy reality. Two of the things that make Perception Check very different to the majority of it is that there's first been someone from that world crossing into our own, and that the party deliberately plan to cross over. So much portal fantasy is accidental or unintended, but this we see careful planning, or as close to carefully planning as three naïve and foolish kids can manage. I loved the idea of the fantasy world being turned into a game world, and the way it teased connections for a while before they crossed over. 

Violet is a fantastic main character, and I felt like the story dealt really well with her trauma and the consequences of it. There's a sensitivity there, and a thoughtfulness to it all that made it feel safe to read, after I was initially concerned about some of the content warnings being potential triggers for me. 

There's also a lot of excellent representation here. This is a diverse world where lots of different types of people are represented, or rather it's two diverse worlds with strong representation. I also really liked the central relationship being a strong platonic love, something we don't see enough of in fiction. 

The fantasy world felt imaginative and interesting, and although much of it is clearly Dungeons and Dragons inspired, there was an effort put in to make it different, and plenty of originality there. It also felt like a lot of the peril and danger was very real. It's fascinating seeing "normal people" dropped into a dangerous fantasy world, and seeing how different it is, and also the parallels, between the games they play and the world for real. 

All in all, I thought Perception Check was an excellent read and an interesting start to a new series.

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Perception Check by Astrid Knight is out now. I was given a review copy in exchange for this honest review and participation in this The Write Reads blog tour.