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Raymond A. Finch III

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good but not exceptional

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-08-23

The narrator is great.

The story is okay

The characters are good, except the villains. The villains are very predictable.

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The pinnacle of edgelord entertainment.

Overall
1 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
1 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 08-17-22

The lead character is a stereotypical try-hard edgelord, and everything else in the story just supports that. I listened to the entire first book hoping for some kind of character growth, or something interesting, but there's still nothing there but grim, juvenile edginess for its own sake. I didn't manage to get through this one.

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Who's the target audience?

Overall
1 out of 5 stars
Performance
2 out of 5 stars
Story
1 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 08-17-22

I don't know who this book was written for. The plot and characters are simplistic enough for young kids, think He-man or Thundercats complexity. Then death and dismemberment is everywhere. The magical stuff here seems drawn from tabletop and computer RPGs. The dialog is awkward and unnatural throughout, and none of the characters act like people. The world goes into chaos and the lead characters experience magical events, even gaining magic powers. Through all of that no one freaks out. The response from everyone is calm, but passing, interest. It's like none of it is a big deal. It's a jumbled mess.

I couldn't finish this thing it's just bad.

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The narrator was good...

Overall
1 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
1 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 07-21-22

The narrator did an excellent job with what he had.

That's the best I can say for the book.
The characters were all flat and generally uninteresting.
The main character seemed like he was based on an angsty adolescent boy's idea of what a supernatural badass should be. He was a gladiator/assassin in Hell, and he's basically unkillable. In each situation presented he cycles through a few activities, he makes a juvenile sounding threat, he makes a flippant remark to the effect of "I don't have to play by your rules!", or he's trying to kill someone. His general attitude constantly brought to mind an obnoxious teenager.
There were a few times in the book when I thought something was meant to be a joke. Maybe for someone with a drastically different sense of humor and a different idea of what makes a character interesting this could be a decent book. For me it was tiresome.

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This could have been written by an AI.

Overall
1 out of 5 stars
Performance
2 out of 5 stars
Story
1 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 12-14-21

Throughout this entire book there may be five or six times when a character speaks in a natural, casual way. Most of the dialog comes across as formal or simply unnatural. There are robots in this book, but even the human characters come across as robotic.
The story is, at turns, tedious and baffling.
The first half of this book is made up of tedious, mundane conversations between an engineer and his wife, and then even more tedious conversations between this engineer and his coworkers.
The second half of the book involves this engineer being called back to evaluate the AI again years later. This time he's robbed in his own home before he can leave. Then he is pursued by unknown assailants while he flees with the woman who robbed him. There's an odd divergence into the hobo lifestyle as the two are on the run.
Then the book ends in a rather blunt and unsatisfying manner. None of the odd occurrences are explained in a satisfactory way. So the latter half of the book seems like a random assortment of events, without purpose.

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A good start.

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 12-18-20

The narration was excellent.

The story was good, but ended where I felt the last act was going to begin. Things built up, but there was not really a climax. I'd prefer if it ended better, but I'm still tempted to look into the next one.

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