Full disclosure: I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.
Spoilers in the review below.
The book starts off with Charlie & company being sucked through a wormhole, unintentionally, when they were testing their warp drive. Seems like a leap, but the wormhole circumstances didn’t appear to be of their doing, so could be explained later. The wormhole deposits Charlie & company in a new universe. The captain then decides to initiate a test at full settings after the mishap of the wormhole. This seemed questionable to me as a seasoned captain would not make that kind of blunder. After the last fiasco of warp/wormhole travel, shouldn’t the captain start off testing the systems with lower settings, then ramp up to get a better feel and not just straight blunder through. This decision resulted in the ship crash landing on a planet the ship was orbiting. Where the majority of the crew are killed and rest are left injured, some severely, This ultimately leads to two of the crew being abducted and forced into slavery, while the remaining ones are murdered. But before the abduction, Charlie and the remaining senior officer take a dip in a pool that rejuvenated them.
Now Charlie and the senior officer are examined to determine if they have magic, they do not.
Charlie then proceeds through the experiences of being a slave, escaping, and then being abducted again, but being forced to join a pirate crew. All the while learning different phrases people associated with magic, as Charlie stubbornly refuses to believe in the existence of magic for about 3/4ths of the book. Instead he believes they are keywords that related to tech and are needed to kick off those “spells”. Think of it as similar to saying “Ok Google ” or “Alexa “. By this time, the senior officer is lobotomized and sold off. There are some questionable actions/decisions/scenarios when he is among the pirates. Charlie appears to be a jack of all trades as he has past military training, martial arts training, and engineering skills. His knowledge of martial arts allows him to incapacitate people that are out to kill him. Even when he hasn’t practiced in so long he has lost muscle and developed some flab on his belly. While picking martial arts back up is possible, it doesn’t seem likely when your pirating, it would be hectic and life threatening to get back into form. But Charlie just does it.
He eventually makes friends with members on the pirate crew and elevates his rank by putting his engineering skills to work. Charlie learns that due to the dip in that spring that rejuvenated him, his wounds heal really quickly, not Wolverine quickly, but many times faster than a normal human would. He is also able to use some magic, although its difficult. Then he gets captured again by the original slavers. Charlie then started to show promise as a gladiator, but was tested and failed a test. Afterwards, the slavers sold him to be Dragon fodder. However, Charlie proves some interesting results and gets bathed in Dragon blood, which is normally fatal, but not for Charlie due to the rejuvenation spring. He is eventually sent to train with a gladiator master and excels. He finally accepts magic is real. In the final battle of the book, it is a gladiator combat with lots of gladiators and wild chained dragons. Charlie manages to ride a dragon, which has never been done before and wins the objective ending the match. This scene was the most interesting and favorite part of the book.
End of spoilers
Overall, the book had interesting moments and some dull moments, even some questionable situations. There are some plot holes, such as Charlie being a jack of all trades. But hopefully, the author will improve and get better.
As an aside, everytime the narrator pronounced the ship’s name, it sounded like “Assbrew”. Unless this was intentional, should probably take more care with names.
The narrator did a decent job. I would have liked to hear differing voices for the characters more. There seemed to be only 2 distinct male voices and the female characters, the few there were, all sounded the same to me.