Amazing, Can't wait for the next book

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. The story is very engaging and moves at a steady pace. The MC is powerful yet also balanced. Jeff Hayes has done and incredible job as always. Huge fan of his narrations.

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Masterful

Absolutely fantastic. I don't usually listen to a book more than once, but I could put this one on repeat.

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Don't Buy This Book

I really enjoyed this book, but I can't recommend it because it's part of a series which will obviously never be finished. Don't waste your time

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Best book ever!!

Loved everything about the book. Narration was great as always and the story had me on my toes waiting for what was next. Can’t wait for the next book.

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Just epic all around

Loved this book I hope the writers got more comming because I’m willing to preorder the whole damn collection

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Wow

As usual Jeff Hays and sound both theatre did an amazing job, but the story was riveting. I couldn’t stop listening and finished it in 1 day. I can only hope Antonio Terzini finishes book 2 in the near future

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Unrealized Potential

I'll start by addressing the performance as I have little in the way of critique of it. There was sufficient vocal variety to readily differentiate characters and dialogue usually had appropriate inflection of tone to match the emotional state that was written. The only real issue I had was on the part of whoever did the sound engineering they, for some unknown reason, added an echo effect to some of the dialogue which was annoying. But ultimately, the performance was serviceable if not memorable.

Now let's talk about the story which is the reason for the headline of this review. The truth of anything often lies somewhere between the varying views that people provide on it. After going through some of the five stars, this book is great reviews, and some of the lengthier this book is flawed reviews I would agree with some points.

1. No characters in this book jump out as being particularly memorable or likable. I feel like this was in part because the Author, Antonio Terzini, was looking to bring key players and upcoming events to light without really establishing them well.

2. It does suffer from genre tropes to a significant degree. However, I will say that it also breaks away from some of said tropes nicely. A good example is that the unexpectedly friendly nobles that pick Dante up near the beginning turn out to be evil (with the exception of the younger brother Alex), rather than becoming the beginnings of his new harem/fan club/what have you.

3. The world feels ever so slightly contrived and the repeated status stuff really did break narrative flow and immersion. While this may be part of this genre, I feel there is a better way to handle this in-universe than a literal menu. In another book I read, Sufficiently Advanced Magic, there was a similar concept to the status and classifications but they had to use an actual, in universe-item, made by people to apply numbers to the gifts given by the goddess.

Those are the common criticisms I ready, I do not disagree with them but I would say that I found some of the reviews to be harsh. There is some potential in this book, primarily in the protagonist Dante himself. As he is presented in this book he comes off, to me, as kind of a bland and unlikable blank slate character. Very par for the course considering his given origin, friendly and polite despite a life of abuse. Intelligent and adaptive to an insane degree and experiencing rapid power gains despite it supposedly being hard for normal people to power up in the world, but hey he got special gifts. But all these things are par for the course for this kind of book.

However, what I think is interesting about Dante is he might be crazy which would make a certain deal of sense. Abused, used, hunted, and socially isolated I got the impression that our author was wavering between two ideas for Dante. Sometimes his blandness comes off as him just being a standard, Gary Stu-esque protagonist. Other times it comes off as him being completely devoid of empathy and a real monster. The latter would be an interesting take and even characters in the book suggest it might be so at varying points. However, little in the narration we experience from Dante actually makes me think he is that disturbed, although that would be very interesting.

Anyway, I think I will get the sequel as I did enjoy this one. I just hope that the author can resolve some of this issues. Make the world feel less contrived, do a bit more showing and a lot less telling when it comes to characters, stray further from genre tropes and make Dante's degrading mental state come off more in the naration. I mean, the only times it really seemed like he was coming unhinged it was blamed on the glove, come on man! But yeah, over all it was enjoyable for me, I'd recomend it, but there is missed potential here.

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