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This was a pretty fun adventure featuring a sapient shrub as hero who is determined to break new ground for Awakened (i.e. free-willed) monsters in terms of being an Adventurer. Which is a bit ridiculous, but pretty funny as he gathers like-minded friends and charms his way into Adventurer circles. While Shrubley himself is painfully naïve, the narrative voice is third-person omniscient, making this an overt shot at humor. Which it mostly hits. I was entertained, at any rate.

The biggest drawback of the story is that there is a severe tone shift along the way where Shrubley and his friends fall into a dark world and a grim apocalypse nearing completion and that shift was a little overwhelming. And it doesn't help that we get a training montage in the midst of relentless pursuit. And yes, that's every bit as awkward as it seems it would be. And don't get me started on squandering (view spoiler)[Baba Yaga's deep legends with a cheap knockoff semi-mother figure (hide spoiler)].

This tone shift made the humor harder to sustain. And to be fair, the author doesn't buck it enough to be jarring. Which was definitely a danger. Still, I feel like I was thrust into a grimmer story than I had been promised with that start and that feeling never really went away.

I'm going to give this 3½ stars, but round to four. Not for the humor, which wasn't bad, but for the scrappy Shrubley himself who really does have a huge heart and boundless determination to do the right thing.

A note about Chaste: Do I really need to say this is chaste? He's a shrub. And his companions are a skeleton and a slime. There's no steam. Nor any hint of steam. Obviously. This is completely chaste. As you'd expect.