Confessions of a Part time Sorceress -- Shelley Mazzanoble

Confessions of a Part-time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the D&D Game By Shelly Mazzanoble

     Talk about super long titles. The thing to remember before picking up this book is that this is a humor book. It has a little of the most basic information about D&D in it but it is primarily a humor book. The narrator of this little adventure is a self proclaimed girly girl who never really saw the point of playing D&D even though she works for Wizards of the Coast. She believed all the stereotypes about gamers: overweight, smelly teenage boys playing dress up in their parents basements. Her coworkers persuade her to play a game with them and those stereotypes all get thrown out the window. She puts all the character classes and races into her own little categories and defines them in an extremely girly style with quizzes to help the reader decide which to be. She does the same with equipping her character as well as everything else to do with the game.

     I really enjoyed her stories of things that happen in her games from sound effects to attempting to make her friends play with her as a sort of social experiment. The side bars have some interesting information in them; a little bit of history, some themed recipes and my favorite: a list of famous people who play D&D. Maybe it was the fact I read this right after Ready Player One and was feeling nostalgic or because I’m tying to persuade some of my friends to play the game with me but I seriously enjoyed this book for the humor and the extremely basic information and how to present it to people who’ve never played before. This book was short enough that I finished it in a couple hours and I couldn’t put it down once I’d started reading.