One of the main problems I personally had with this book was the Main Character. The author made him an a**hole. Oh certainly, he’s a villain and that’s kind of the point, But when an a**hole (not even a likeable one at that) gets tricked by other a**holes, I end up not caring about either side winning and kind of wish they would BOTH die. Its sort of like watching 2 pedophiles having a fight in an alley way, I don’t want to applaud either of them, much less the one that also ****s cats. And just because you have the MC say “damn I’m brilliant”, or have a side character go on about how clever/inspiring the MC is, it doesn’t make me believe that the MC is actually smart. I only picture the author patting himself on the back for what he believes to be clever. The performer was also a problem I had, as his reading tended to either far to emotionless when it shouldn’t have been while at other times he’s trying to make line delivery seem “bada**” but just comes off as trying to hard. Of course it doesn’t help that the author won’t allow the MC to speak with contractions in any shape or form because, as near as I can figure, he feels that makes the MC sound smarter and charismatic but it only makes his speech sound stilted and jarring, though that may ALSO be due to the performers reading. This could be forgiven if the books humor had maybe been a bit better, but unfortunately the majority of the jokes fall back on what can be summed up as “just say **** and hope for a laugh.” or the joke of “let me go on about how I hate millennials for 10 minutes” that gets used far to often to be funny by the last time its used. And when the author points out a trope while still following said trope, though he does subvert these a few times for what turn out to be a few decent laughs, it’s as if he expects me to think that this self awareness is clever and new. I will admit that the overall story had a few good moments, as well as the way the story wraps up neatly and smartly and some of the reference humor to other fantasy stories was funny at times, but all in all I just cannot recommend this book.