Jake Justen > Recent Status Updates

The writing is so bad. It's like reading a game's user manual after it's been converted to prose. On top of that, this wasn't even run through a spelling/grammar check.

This is going pretty quick, but I'm also skipping large sections which are just a list of the character's stats and explanations of said stats. I don't care about any of those, and skipping hasn't negatively impacted my understanding of the story.

"I began creeping through the woods, carefully, like a creeping thing."

"I...walked into the small cave searchingly."

"Please chose two buffs for yourself at first level!"

I knew this was going to be a Mary Sue/Gary Stu narrative, since it's introduced before Chapter 1 that the character is unbound. I couldn't care less about the character's stats, those lists were easy skims and now I skip them entirely.

"stated the angry demon angrily" is a real thing that the author wrote and kept in the book.

After the interesting section about deluge/flood mythology around the ancient world, it gets pretty slow. Good thing I am listening to an audiobook, I think reading it would have put me to sleep or I would have quit or at least skimmed a lot. Audio quality is understandably rough, being a LibriVox recording; no professional voice over narrators or professional audio/recording equipment.

In the middle of the second section, which includes an interesting overview of various deluge/flood narratives from various cultures around the world, including the well-known Noahic flood narrative from Genesis.

Update #3: The thing I can't figure out, and this is the real mystery of the book, is what the hell does the main character actually do? She's not medical, not an investigator, not an ornithologist, I don't think she's an employee of the hotel; she's related to people and has inserted herself into events of the book? She's not even a sleuth, she's just nosey.

Update #2: Everyone is very concerned about the temperature being in the mid-20s, weather in which I've camped and Midwestern folks wear shorts and hoodies. Characters talk about the black market as if it's a store you can go to. Main character makes a lot of mental notes; she'll never remember all of them. There is a Cline-ian impulse for characters to imitate pop culture characters, and then immediately explain it.

Check in #1: I am more than a third through the book and the mystery has just been introduced. This has happened multiple times in cozy Christmas mysteries. The mystery must be "when does the mystery get introduced?". Every character has an odd way of wording sentences; I've had to reread several. And why do we need references to Harry Potter (oh, the owls) and an Ernest Cline-ian reference to Gandalf?