Hii

Well, I finished reading Cryptic Investigation. While I feel it does drag on at points, I like the fact that it has a nice variety of elements - it has human villains that pose a real threat to the characters, it displays their thoughts and emotions and shows things from their perspective as well as the heroes, it puts the heroes in "chalkless" situations where they have to survive using their own wits, it makes them deal with the fantasy environs of ChalkZone itself (I loved when they were camping in the "wilderness"!), it introduces creative situations and ideas (like that constantly reconstructing building), and it brought Snap into the real world and also had the ChalkZone interact with the real world in interesting ways (like smoke from ChalkZone spilling out into the real world). I also liked seeing Bob being increasingly angry at Rudy and Penny, blaming them for doing things like setting his building on fire on purpose and such. Just totally misunderstanding what they were doing.

Now for my criticisms, but please don't take this the wrong way - I enjoyed the story and felt the good easily outweighed the elements I feel could have been improved.

My main criticism really is that I feel it just drags at points, with scenes that go on longer than I feel they should. And also, seeing the heroes go on a big adventure and come back mostly empty-handed was disappointing. I also found it weird that they went on that adventure in an attempt to stop a human messing with the world - I figured it would make sense for them to try to learn more about the real world and deal with threats there, or use ChalkZone to warp between locations (like with the TV station late in the story). So while I liked their adventure, I felt the justification for it was a bit lacking. 

My favorite parts were anything involving the human villains (I tend to love that kind of interaction, so that's a personal preference), and the "survival" moments when they had no chalk and had to try to stay alive in a hostile and strange world with rapid rivers, icy caverns, rearranging pitch dark buildings, and more. And that camping. 

As for what I might have liked to have seen done differently, would have been a bit more focus on the characters' thoughts and some pacing changes. But again, just my opinion. 

But overall, it was a great read, and it had a lot going for it! Really glad I got to read it all! 💯

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