The premise intrigued me, a man given a chance to apply a lifetime of knowledge in a whole new life. Unfortunately, it suffers from critical shallowness. The main character is a Gary-Stu who experiences no inner growth. He is the super hero with all the advantages in this story. Every challenge is dealt with easily and makes everyone look up to him and respect him (except the token antagonists of course). While he is missing knowledge of this new world, he acquires it easily, although it’s really redundant; the knowledge from his past world is better anyway. There are no wise lessons for him to learn; he uses the wisdom he already has to demand people’s admiration and respect. By the end, the whole story took a tragic plunge into the social justice realm, and suffered from the same common flaw in SJ literature: it preaches instead of teaches. This is similar to the “show, don’t tell” rule of writing. The story all of a sudden wants to take up the politics of gender equality with no contextual basis for doing so. The topic ends up being a vestigial tumor on the story without enough narrative depth to support the theme. If the main character wants to fight for equality, we should know why he believes in it in the first place. There should be some reason to support him not only taking up the banner, but having the conviction to carry it the distance. In this story, there is no personal experience to justify the main character even caring about it. He’s a king in one life, and an op mage in the next. I think this story is lots of action and fantasy fluff, but little depth. It stretches itself thin chasing too many themes, such as family, racism, wisdom, equality, political agenda, etc, but hasn’t been able to justify having half of these themes in the story. I don’t know if the author corrects any of these in future books, but I won’t be spending my time to find out.