Nathan Parker

Tedious, unimaginative story

Revisado: 12-26-24

A tedious, unimaginative story. The narrator doesn't help. It's rarely a good choice to have a female narrator for a male character, but a good narrator can compensate. This one can't, and compounds the problem with a flat monotone delivery. And slow.

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Very well written

Revisado: 12-20-24

It's impressive that the author can make a compelling story with so little progression. Part of his success is writing compelling characters, so that you're interested in them in spite of the slow progress. However, I will probably not read any further stories in this series because ***spoiler*** the author will apparently keep killing off almost all the friends our MC acquires. Note to the author: a character's success depends on dragging his friends along. If he's the only one that survives, it's not success.

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Vaguely amusing, ruined by constant shouting

Revisado: 11-08-24

The premise to the story is great and had the potential to be a great source of hilarity, but the author wasn't able to follow up on that. At best, there is a low hum of amusement, more at the satirical take on the fantasy writer's craft than with the story itself. After six hours of listening, our MCs have mostly only interacted with each other and only in a bickering fashion.

I might have had the patience to listen further, but the narrator's take *on his own material* is having the characters shout at each other continually, either in outrage or stunned incredulity. This high voltage, single note narration is exhausting to listen to and I just can't take it anymore.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Well-written, well-narrated

Revisado: 10-13-24

This series is vastly better written than other books of the genre. My only complaint about the writing style is the overuse of some words, like "dance" when referring to fighting. It's a rather stale metaphor by this point, yet the author invokes it during every battle as if it's some great insight. And real battle doesn't even look like a dance. The other overused word is "insensate", although less frequent than "dance". It's probably not a good synonym for "unconscious".

Oh, and animals don't roar when attacking out of ambush--not sure why all fantasy books depict that. Roaring would spoil the surprise and even animals aren't that stupid.

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MC boring

Revisado: 10-08-24

This novel is a time regression story, not really an isekai. The author is ham-fisted in how he depicts the old man; he walks with a cane and refers to younger folk as "lad" or "lass", and generally speaks in a stiff manner. This doesn't change when he's spirited away into his younger body. My guess is that the author can't figure out any other way to convey the character's age. This is a continual problem in entertainment media where the writers want to depict someone ancient and wise: since the writers aren't ancient and wise, they have no idea how to write such characters. Anyway, this makes the character hard to relate to or like.

The problem is compounded by the narrator, who uses his old man voice for the younger version of himself, a monotone, gravelly voice with a bad British accent. This was a poor choice by the voice actor, who should have tried to humanize the character.

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Unlikeable Characters

Revisado: 10-04-24

It's hard to make bad guys into likeable protagonists, and this author doesn't succeed. The "Code" that our protagonist, Wolf (eye roll), has that's supposed to show him to be an upstanding guy is that he doesn't hurt women. While that's great, it's also a very low moral bar. Even so, I was willing to keep listening, until I got to the part where he entered a dungeon with Miriam, the daughter of the big boss. He was *supposed* to be taking her to the airport and was charged with her safety; instead, he drove to a dungeon, got into a fight with a rival gang, damaging his boss's expensive vehicle, before taking her inside. This behavior is totally inexplicable, given the world-building, Wolf's world-weary experience, and his relationship to the big boss. The author clearly wanted her inside the dungeon and couldn't be bothered to construct a reasonable scenario to put her there. I lost my will to continue.

The card stuff, by the way, is far too complicated. I understood almost nothing that was going on.

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Romance is a bit overdone

Revisado: 10-02-24

The overall plot is mildly engaging and the MC is likeable. However, the romantic overlay is overdone, with the interplay between our romantic leads being ham-fisted and just too much, causing eye-rolls in the reader: "I was playing a dangerous game. He was a flame and I was afraid of getting burned." That cringey line, or one very close to it, was used multiple times in the story. I can't imagine how the author can drag this out over three books.

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Implausible MC; narrator annoying

Revisado: 10-01-24

The MC is supposed to be 16, but he has the vocabulary of an mature adult. And the self-possession, too. Very unconvincing characterization.

The narrator has weird intonations to most of his characters, with the voice pitch running up and down in the course of one sentence, like a cartoon character. That breaks the immersion of a serious plot line and becomes very annoying. I'm stopping in the middle.

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Pretty good character development

Revisado: 09-21-24

The author does a good job representing a teenager. He's not wise beyond his years, and vacillates between self-confidence and diffidence, just as you'd expect with a well-adjusted kid his age. Nice to see a protagonist who doesn't suffer from social anxiety, which seems to popular with this genre.

Minor complaints: the narrator talks too slowly; I boosted the speed 10%. The author overuses some expressions, like "That's for sure". The justification for keeping Longbeard in jail was weak; the story claimed it was because he knew something, but the knowledge he had was non-obvious and the bad guy had no way to know about it. It was just a plot device. It was also weak that only our protagonist identified the relationship between the two people named "Black'.

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Too much tragedy and weak MC

Revisado: 09-13-24

I had a really hard time getting behind the MC; while she's a good person, she also seems weak and not remarkable. I was looking forward to seeing how she conquered the trials mentioned in the plot summary, but it looks like she's going to succeed only with the help of others, rather than her own ability or pluckiness. Yeah, I quit listening.

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