I received this book in exchange for an honest review, which has not altered my opinion.

I had such high hopes for this book. Honestly! It’s every nerd’s and video game player’s dream: to enter that fantasy world where you are rewarded for knowing so much about magic and fantasy! Which is exactly what happens to the main characters in this book. However, I felt as though this fell through as a story and there were so many things that just did not work for me.

The characters themselves I felt like we were presented with characters who had already been formed and I didn’t feel like I ever really knew enough about them to particularly care for them as I like to when I read. This book had the characters putting their lives at risk every few pages with their battles and for much of it I didn’t really care who won. The characters we met in the other realm, I felt as though they weren’t given a solid shot at being an important character, and several characters were killed off for unexplained reasons that really added next to nothing to the storyline for me. So many names were thrown out in the first few chapters that it took me nearly half of the book to fully figure out who everyone was.

I felt as though the plot was simplistic but also choppy, and the writing was difficult to hold an interest in. It was written like a video game with all the cool weapons and the skill increases and magic spells and armor, but that didn’t really help me to find an interest in the story itself. However, the fight scenes were well written and I followed them easily, which was helpful since they did constitute the majority of the book. There was the minor detail where all these characters entered a world where they were suddenly actually killing things and this didn’t seem to bother any of them. Like at all, which makes me wonder what their day jobs were back home…

I think there is potential in the idea of this story but I don’t think that I would read a sequel unless the style was changed in a way that allowed me to connect with the characters and place. This just left me a bit disappointed and unsatisfied and just feeling meh.