SLIME SWEETS AND DUNGEON TREATS by Pandora Pierce│Review

Hey Bookworm friends! I have to be honest, the main reason I picked up Slime Sweets and Dungeon Treats is that adorable and very inviting cover! The second reason is that, despite not entirely loving Dungeon Crawler Carl, I am not ready to give up on LitRPGs as a whole. So, when I saw it on BookSirens I immediately snapped it up!

Thanks to BookSirens and the author for the ARC; All opinions are my own.

Book Details

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Blurb

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Forget about fighting monsters. Be a Slime Friend instead!

When Hazel wakes up in a dungeon full of monsters, she’s told to choose a weapon and start fighting. Instead, she picks a grilled cheese, because who needs weapons when you’ve got food?

The system rewards her ridiculous decision with a brand-new class: Culinary Mage. Instead of grinding monsters, Hazel’s winning over slimes with homemade treats and discovering that a good meal can do far more than fill an empty stomach.

With her new food-based skills, Hazel opens a cozy little cafe in the middle of the dungeon. Before long, all kinds of monsters are flocking to her door for treats, slimes are evolving before her eyes, and even other adventurers begin wondering if there’s more to life than fighting their way to the next floor.

But in a dungeon built for battle, can Hazel really change the rules with nothing but delicious food, stubborn optimism, and a pack of hungry slimes?

Review

A cozy LitRPG that’s the opposite of Delicious in Dungeon; instead of cooking monsters, it’s cooking *for* monsters.

This cozy little tale charmed me with its quirky beginning where, instead of choosing a weapon, she chooses a sandwich and the dungeon system makes a whole new class for her: Culinary Mage! It’s unheard of and she has to figure it out by trial and error. How is she going to level up by cooking? Where is she going to get her ingredients from? And why does it taste like cardboard? Luckily she has help from her slime friends that she most definitely will not be killing. In fact, you better not lay a finger on those squishy blobs! Hazel endeared herself to me right away with her no-fighting rule and creative-solutions mindset.

“This grilled cheese sandwich, in all its cheesy glory, is now my weapon.”

One thing this book did really well is create a warm atmosphere. Between all the adorable monster companions, and the day to day moments of figuring out how her character class worked, it really did feel like playing a cozy cooking / farm simulation game. Unfortunately, there is such thing as too sweet and comfortable. It took me a while to get through the first half because there wasn’t enough conflict, nothing to really grip me. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of ‘trials’ or ‘competition’ plot lines and while this story technically didn’t have trials, it did have quests and I had a breakthrough while reading this. A big reason I haven’t gotten along really well with LitRPGs thus far is for the same reason, the repetitiveness of that linear plot progression. Quest (or Trial). Level Up. Repeat. How about if I don’t? It wasn’t until around the second half of the book, where the story broke out of that pattern, that it became way more interesting.

“Food was transformative and apparently so meaningful that it left a mark on my soul. One I couldn’t forget no matter what tricks this dungeon played on me.”

The introduction of a couple of new POV characters suddenly made me perk up and pay more attention. One of them is a mysterious romantic interest that I won’t say much about because it’s a spoiler but he was awkward in a charming sort of way. If ,like me, you’re a fan of the ‘fish out of water’ trope, you might like this character as well. There is also a woman who is one of Hazel’s dungeon delving friends who gets a small ‘sidequest’, if you will, that I thought was also awesome. In the later half of the book, the focus turned away from leveling up, towards a dungeon community supporting each other to face their fears and follow their dreams and I loved it.

Throughout all the cooking adventures, there’s been a mystery floating in the back of Hazel (and the reader)‘s minds. Why are we even in the dungeon in the first place? While we’re slowly getting distracted by tasty treats and adorable creatures, there’s something much bigger looming in the background that we can no longer ignore at the end. The answer to that mystery was entirely unexpected yet satisfying; the pieces all connected beautifully. If it wasn’t for that ending I don’t think I’d want to read more in that world but, as it is, I’ll keep an eye out for a future book 2.

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