Anya Dazel is a burnt-out barkeep in Eternity: The Endless Realm, the world’s premier online role-playing game. As a non-player character, her life is stuck in a programmed loop—forever serving the same drinks to the same patrons and helping players with an automatic quest event that unfolds when they enter her pub. She longs for any disruption to this monotonous existence, even if that feels like an impossible dream.
But when Eternity receives an update, and Cyrus Blackwood is added to Anya’s pub, her dream unfurls as a nightmare. Cyrus is everything that Anya is not—a mysterious, brooding warrior with a gigantic sword and a tortured past. Everyone in the tavern is fascinated by him, and even worse, when the next player arrives, it’s Cyrus who helps them with their quest, not Anya. Realizing that she’s being replaced, Anya lashes out at Cyrus, inadvertently knocking them both out of her tavern and into the wider realm of Eternity.
Free from their encoded home, Anya and Cyrus must work together to navigate a dangerous open world, overcoming hordes of monsters, devious puzzles, and maybe even an existential crisis or two. But as they struggle to overcome their distaste for each other and stay alive, they discover that their roles within Eternity might not be as programmed as they thought, and Anya will need to prove that even barkeeps can be heroes.
The Side Questers, the debut novel by J.J. Kochmanski, will be published July 21, 2026. Keylight Books provided an early galley for review.
As a gamer, former software developer, and a fantasy writer myself, this book sounded like a lot of fun. Plus, I always am interested in what new voices are bringing to the genre.
I found it engaging right out of the gate. Kochmanski builds off an interesting premise, and he captures the repetition of NPC dialogue and routines perfectly. Anya's voice is distinct and relatable. What she encounters provides some commentary on MMORPG games, their worlds and their players.
The middle spends quite a bit of time in the Pit whose purpose for the narrative I totally get (can't really be major heroes of the story and complete the overall game quest if you're lowly level 1 adventurers). I liked seeing the puzzles and the solutions, but it felt like it took a long time. Also, when Anya and Cyrus meet and re-meet the trio of players, it seemed like a bit of too convenient. I was fine with the first encounter as that helped them to learn more about the game. The return just felt like a way to get out of a narrative corner.
As for the ending, while enjoyable and what I expected, I found it tied up everything very neatly in a very quick way. I was hoping for a bit more.
Still, a fun book that touches on a lot of popular genres right now: cozy fantasy, LitRPG, and romantasy. I will certainly give his next book a shot.
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