Deborah > Recent Status Updates

Wears out its welcome long before its conclusion

Miss Clack appears to exist wholly so the narrative can mock her. Not only does that feel very mean-spirited, but it's also unjust. Miss Clack has a point, extreme but not without truth: many of the others ARE acting entirely selfishly, and she DOES try to calm a situation, only to be blamed for it instead. This treatment of her character brings the book down at least a star and makes me dislike the author.

I really don't like Scarlett. Alas. Stroud is a wonderful author, but I remembered being lukewarm about this book, and that's still accurate. We'll see if it picks up.

Read 2% of its 11k pages.

My copy had the changed ending, which wasn't great. I didn't even know there were two endings before. Original ending is better, but book only okay anyway.

Beginning was superb. Rest was increasingly bloated, preachy, dull, and problematic.

If El's so good at death and destruction, how come she's so meh at taking out mals? I get the ultra powerful ones, but once she has access to more mana, shouldn't she be able to wipe a room of smaller ones with a single spell? She keeps boasting she can do things like set off a super volcano and kill all the students no problem, including the seniors, yet ( so far), she's not been very impressive.

Boo hoo, no one wants to be my friend, and they blame it all on me, because I'm horrifically and aggressively rude constantly. . . .

Sigh. But it's not unrealistic, so I'm not exactly docking the book for it. It's holding up on reread. Won't bother with mediocre book 2 or trash book 3, but this one stands alone fine and is really very good. Even the excessive exposition dumps are interesting.

Arc3

Enjoyable read but not compelling due to not having plot or motivation so it's basically just watching gim wander around gaining levels in a litrpg dnd world

A bit of RL Stein, a bit of Bruce Coville, but a bit neutered.

Title is meaningless.

Superb.

Ooh, looks like the file I have isn't complete. I only have 1158 out of the 1211 chapters. So I'm missing the last what, 300 pages? Must find.

After the School of the Afterlife, which was sadly bloated, the quality returned. I'll definitely finish!

Quality definitely lower these past few hundred pages. A lot of information repetition (and it sometimes seems like the author has forgotten earlier material, which would hardly be surprising). I'm not quite ready to give up . . . but there are another 1500 pages to go, and that's way too much to just *get through.* Hope it picks up again!

Most pages I've ever read in a web novel -- they usually turn bad way before this. And this one's still going strong! Only 3600 pages to go . . .