The Regional Office is Under Attack!

The story is told mainly from the perspective of 2 characters, with portions of a 'history book' weaved in between the change of character perspectives.

The characters themselves are pretty interesting. The book is a Sci-Fi Action Comedy, and the comedy mostly comes from the narration essentially being the characters' run on thoughts. Since the narration is sort of all over the place it can be a little hard to follow, but once I tried not to think about it too much I came to enjoy the emotional/thought roller coaster.

I would have liked a bit of a break from the thought narration when it switched to a supposedly history book perspective, but that seemed to have the same style of narration only without knowing whom exactly the thoughts belong to.

The Regional Office the characters and the main plot revolve around is sort of interesting too, but does not really get explored all that much. Supposedly the organization goes on missions to save the world on a regular basis, but there's no sense of how or why the office should or should not exist. Given how lengthy the book already is though, it would have been difficult to flesh that out.

Perhaps it would have been interesting for this to be a series. The first book could have covered the formation of the Regional Office, establish what threats the office protects the world from, and getting all the characters' origins into place with the ending teasing the events that cause the attack on the Regional Office.

So in a way, there was too much going on in the book, and at the same not enough. All the characters' origins and consequences of their decisions throughout the story were told really well. The author just needed more books to really tell the story well.

Short plot summary: The Regional Office is a home for trained operatives (theoretically?) fighting Forces of Darkness and are under titular attack by other operatives (for reasons). The backstory follows operatives on either side of this fight, with some more historical papers in the middle to provide other background on the office. Overall, lots of action, fluffy, fun characters, nothing too serious.

I really enjoyed this book's wry humor and plot structure. I am always a huge sucker for interspersing character history flashbacks into the middle of a longer present day timeline. (Hi, Ancillary Justice). The prose reads in a stream of consciousness way where a character will think one thing and go wait no not that, this other thing, or insert wry asides about what's happening. I felt very much like something intended to be read out loud, as if the third person narration were written as a dialogue with the reader.

Almost all of the action takes place in the regional office or small towns, despite references to the office doing heroic feats off page, like stopping evil wizards (only named) and struggling against Forces of Darkness (never described). It's as if this were a D&D campaign that takes place entirely in a pub while the party just casually references historically massive events that they were involved with elsewhere, and where the action is just an all-out brawl with the table of adventurers next to them. I think this actually works with the wry comedic tone of this book.

I think overall I had no idea what to expect from this, but it was fun.

Bonus content warnings: This happens only twice, but there are some weirdly aggressive fat insults; there's also the a fat coworker used as comic relief.