Chris

I like this quote:

“People are information, right? They’re collections of facts, like a favorite food, or mannerisms, like the way they brush hair from their face, or their cause-effect pairs, like how they react to a probing question or an unexpected gift. If you had all the time in the world and math more complex than I’ve ever even heard about, you could reduce every single person down to their own beautiful equation with all its own variables. When a person dies, that equation gets washed away, but everyone she knew still has a piece of it, an expression of that underlying truth. When my mom’s friends die, they’re taking some of the last pieces of her left with them.”

I love Sander, the magic, and the setting of this world - low rating is mostly because it was never finished, the book just stops after chapter 13.

It has many interesting ideas but it's poorly written in a very non-engaging way. Important actions of the protagonist are dealt with in a single passing sentence, you don't get a look inside any characters at all. This book is more like a world building document than an actual story, at least the pacing is good and it's a short read.

I liked the main plot but the main plot is at most 25% of the book, the rest is sometimes funny/clever, often boring interludes that completely destroy the flow and start feeling like annoying interruptions after a while. Didn't finish reading it, dropped it after half the book.

overrated in 2023, I was told it gets good after arc 8, I forced myself through it but still didn't like it, so I stopped reading after arc 9.
It's not rational fiction, it's more like My Hero Academia, a bunch of superheroes and villains each with their own unique quirks bopping around but nobody is min/maxing them.

I liked the rational deductions but there just wasn't much suspense in the book, the story was too uneventful to keep me engaged. This is coming from someone who isn't deep into Superman franchise.

it's pretty good but there are several things I didn't like:
- the cat is annoying. of course that's intentional
- the story is too woke. I don't expect Carl to do PvP and kill other crawlers but saving the elderly from a nursing home that came down into a dungeon, floor to floor, was too cliche for me.
- the fights are too repetitive. while the mobs and bosses have a lot of variety, it's always the cat shooting missiles, Carl punching or throwing explosives that kills them.
- there are lots of descriptions of characters / the environment / the things being built but I often couldn't envision them