Craig Alanson

This was a very positive surprise.
I can't even put into words how satisfying it was to finally read a book where the MC has to teach people the modern world and not fail miserably at explaining technology and science because of a ridiculous level of ignorance.

In my opinion, the dog and all the doggy jokes overstayed their welcome a bit. They were very funny at first, and I liked the dog as a character, but they took up too much time in which nothing else was happening, especially because many of the funny beats were repeated and reiterated countless times.

The pacing was a bit slow at times but I connected to the characters enough to be carried across those dry spells without boredom.

Most of the bad-guy POVs felt kind of pointless and didn't work very well as a foreshadowing tool.
It felt very much like those POVs only existed for this purpose and are not actually about characters that are important to the overarching story. None of these segments had any impact whatsoever on the main cast. It was furthermore very blunt and some of their thought processes were very contrived. I think I would've liked it more if there was just one other POV (apart from the main protagonists) of some semi-bad (maybe surveillance/tech) guy that is caught between the different powers and use him as a vehicle to show the reader the other tidbits of information.

At its core, this is just another chosen-one story about the last wizard protagonist having to triumph over the evil forces of hell the nether but it presents in a way that it never feels like a story of that kind. And while I can not say this with certainty there is a lot of hinting that things are far less black and white and far more complicated behind the scenes. But because this book is not a complete story but only the first sub-section of a proper story arch very little has actually been confirmed about anything at all really so maybe I am just projecting my own hopes here.

To be completely honest this is just a decent book (★★★) but it soothed so many of my pain points that other similar books always seem to torment that I couldn't help but love it.… (meer)