thistlechaser | Book #93 of 2026: The Bee-ginning

The Bee-ginning (The Bee Dungeon #1) by Icalos.

Quick synopsis: Set in a fantasy world, a beekeeper is killed and reborn as a "tower lord" (or dungeon master). Basically he has to build a dungeon from scratch using mana/his mind/magic. Also he has lots of bee friend.

Brief opinion: I appreciate how LitRPG has matured to the point where we could get a book like this. I remember the early days when it was just male fantasy stuff, women only existed for sex (or as the villain if she's ugly), etc.

This was a very nice, calm, cute story. Sort of like cozy LitRPG (two genres that really shouldn't work together but in this case do.)

Plot: When his village is attacked, Belissar is saved by a bee. He awakens as a "dungeon core" (Dungeon Core is a subgenre of LitRPG, basically a dungeon is an extension of one person). He has to build the dungeon from the ground up, picking the type of rooms, features of it, etc. Think the Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley kinds of games.

Most of the dungeon was just Belissar and his bees developing the dungeon and occasionally fighting off a threat.

Editing: Not perfect, but for self-published LitRPG it was good.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: First off, I hated his name. Belissar. Bee-lissar. The book leaned in to puns, which I found neither amusing nor clever. Each chapter had a pun as a title: "Curiosi-Bee", "POBee" (POV), "Shocking Bee-vent!", "Diploma-Bee", etc. At least, other than the main character's name, it was kept to chapter titles.

While I totally accept that the bees wouldn't have actual names, the naming system used by them was really annoying. One bee/character is named "The First Queen of the Second Spawner's First Dynasty, first of her line".

As for things I liked, generally I liked the whole book other than those two minor things. The story was nice, low stakes, and the dungeon building was relaxing in the same way Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley are. The main character was nice, the bees were friendly, everything was just nice and calm and relaxing.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Liked. I had no question at all as to moving on to book two.

DNF #49: The Bears and the Bees by Icalos. I ruined this book for myself. Generally I don't look at reviews until I'm done, but this book seemed slower than the first so I checked a couple reviews to see if others agreed. One review ranted about how often the main character said "Um". I thought that was odd, since I didn't remember him ever saying it. Turns out somehow it just was part of his dialogue to me, my brain never really noticed it. But once I was looking for them... Belissar used at least one "Um" every time he spoke. If a chunk of dialogue has two sentences in it there might be two or more "Um"s. I couldn't stop seeing them to the point where I couldn't even focus on the story anymore, so DNF at 10%. Maybe I'll pick up this book again in the future, once I've forgotten about the Um use.