Munte

Hyper.

Revisado: 09-19-24

This just barely holds together. The world building and plot doesn't really make sense from book to book. The plot is constantly on 1.5 speed with bursts of afterburner acceleration. This goes for most every aspect of the story other than any real and tangible progression with this book like all the others leaving the reader more or less getting the mushroom treatment.
The flow just feels wrong.

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Editing errors.

Revisado: 02-12-24

There are more than the usual annoyances/errors in this the tenth VV narrated book in this series. Like a fully repeated chapter from a previous book for one, I think it was the entirety of Chapter 7. Along with other chronological issues and the regular errors. Even if the VV programming gets better to the point that it reads things correctly it would still need a flawless text to read from.
Also for some reason, the Virtual Voice used for this the tenth book is modelled on a different narrator, for the second time between books 1-10. A female voice at that.. I have no idea why there would be a shift at all. Its Virtual Voice so.. odd.

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Where is the rest of the book?

Revisado: 02-06-24

This book truly felt short which wasn't helped by the tacked on lengthy appendices. The story felt barebones and honestly lacking, something I think could have been overcome with some detail as to the build-up and integration of the two different points of interest after their inclusion.
The narration suffered from the Narrator overreaching when it comes to dialects. I found it jarring about half of the time. Would have been better with more than one narrator.

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Me Like Long Time!

Revisado: 01-29-24

This is the Virtual Voice version of Part One of a series I greatly enjoyed reading.

The Virtual Voice sadly suffers from Artificial Stupid and so listening to this one may find many more annoying error spikes throughout, compared to if it was performed by an average human audio narrator.

I'd say the Virtual Voice AI programming still needs to be improved. A lot!

That said, with some forbearance and this knowledge in mind, this isn't awful. Even though it may actually make this specific work of fiction harder to parse at times.

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A Rather Dreadful Time.

Revisado: 10-13-23

This was an exceedingly painful experience.

I found myself in a near consistently bad mood while listening to this due to the utterly horrifically, absurdly stupid pathetic and shitty main character. Its so bad I keep wondering if the mc hasn't been brain diddled to be a moron, by his enemies offscreen so to say, and that is the plot end that the author is going with for a future book.

Just please! The main character doesn't come across as believable. He has too many issues/imperfections. Its past the point and far beyond by now.
Even supposing one was going with the MC being his own worst enemy as a trope this is beyond that passing the village of Wtf and blazing a trail into the countryside of Fubar!

If humans are terrible the MC is humans cubed or whatever the most horrifying mathematical descriptor there is.

While the retard goes on about being out of touch with his human side,.. and his monster side.. just /sigh. He is literally and in fact the worst type of pathetic human possible. Imagine a Super Human Looser who thinks otherwise. Its just plain silly. All his musings about self etc etc and whatnot just make no sense. I just can not imagine anyone so lacking in self-awareness along with his many other idiosyncrasies.. in a sense, for me, the current version of this stories main character does not make for a believable whole/existence other than being an authors poorly/badly conceived of plot progression sock-puppet.
There are more issues with this book but I figure other reviews will end up mentioning them so I will leave off. I will just sum up with a question: Why is the author intent on making the reader dislike the (not whole) main character?

This is the 8th book in a series and yeah that leaves me deeply invested into the story in ways. With the questionability of this book however I honestly find the idea of purchasing the next book before reading it as a Nope! thing,.. oh I will read it but I will only straight up purchase book nine for my collection if its better compared to this one.

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Disappointed.

Revisado: 09-24-23

1. This was not up to the quality I expect from Joel Shepherd.
2. More often than not I felt like this should have had the Young Adult tag along with the Contemporary, Urban and Paranormal ones that it does have.
3. Much of the stories progression is brought about by idiotic teenagers behaving in contrivedly inane ways to the point that I seriously considered just giving up on the book entirely, followed by returning it for a refund.
4. Then there is the way it is written/narrated. I found that more than slightly distracting to listen to throughout with it never becoming something that I got used to.
5. The Narrator sounding overwrought and weepy when also narrating, not the character emotion which is fine and good, but the third person view or whatever its called.
6. I also found that the main character and her variable boyfriends blatant lack of agency just being sock puppets was Bad. Like playing a overly linear non open-world computer game, very forced.
7. On the whole this first book came across as overly forced in setting up the story world for what I guess is coming. I honestly expected better from this author.

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Loved getting shortchanged!

Revisado: 09-23-23

From the story to the performance I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this book. The whole series so far has been to my taste.

The only issue.. okay so, best way to describe it, that came to mind, would be eating at a top notch restaurant that serves divine food but just not in sizeable enough portions.

Rounding up to 5 for each of the 3 ratings. I rarely rate anything this high.

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Just bad.

Revisado: 04-06-23

Just bad from start to finish. Far too nonsensical. The story came across as an awkward dream one might have while fevered or otherwise sickly.

The primary book descriptors should be Coming of Age and Young Adult. Calling it A Progression Fantasy made no sense to me and if it will end up as an Epic,.. well maybe if a few more books are written. Sadly though I found the world building and magic system to be so poor(vague, nebulous and all to often of questionable logic/continuity), in this the first book, that I just can not imagine that ever happening.

I am not even going to go into what I thought about the Main or Side Characters and other such things since more than an adequate number of reviews going into that and other issues are already to be found for this,.. sad thing, here on Audible.
All I will say is that the Story was in my opinion, ill conceived and poorly executed. Resulting in me just having suffered through near 13h50m of feeling annoyed and disappointed. Even with three breaks in-between listening I barely managed to stop myself from DNF'ing this and returning it several times. With that said, if returning this and recouping the Credit I spent on it would still allow for leaving a review I would do so in a heartbeat.

Having acquired this based on the renome of D.K. Holmberg, a seemingly well established and successful long-time author in the genre, well I now have to question all prior and future works by said author. It truly is a sad day.

The only thing that was good if still not near perfect about this audiobook was the Narration. So a Thumbs Up to John Pirhalla at least.

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Just not good enough.

Revisado: 04-11-22

This book came across as a first attempt at writing a story by 2 hobbyist gamers, who then decided to have it edited for technical issues followed by publication. Its not really bad but neither is it better than (It's Okay) something that I find sad because I perceive some promise overall.

Its like if an apprentice smith went and sold his or her first practice attempt at crafting, say a knife, after hiding said objects flaws as much as possible.

I found way to many story issues that just built up to the point that immersion was unattainable. I found myself just sighing and asking myself Why Why Why the further the story progressed.
Which is sorta ironic with the whole "Why'd ya kill me" thing, that the authors have everything the MC kills utter upon perishing throughout.
My "Why!?" was more for example: Why not loot the room in which you where just required to kill someone before setting it on fire? Why give a false excuse as in "Oh I haven't got the time to loot X".. There was literally no issue of time mentioned up to that point nor after.

Oh yeah the story is also stupidly contrived at times.. f.ex respawning tokens/deaths.

The narration was also nothing special. I actually noticed errors. So sorta disappointed it being SBT.

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Barely redeemed then murdered.

Revisado: 09-10-21

This the second and last book in a side story to Cebelius mainline story, set in the storyverse of Celestine, came close to redeeming both books in my opinion. I did not find close to be good enough in this case.

I found the first book in this side jaunt to be one of the most annoying reads that I have ever forced myself to endure. All because of the absolutely retarded behaviour of the main character in particular.

This continues into book two up until around the 25-27th chapter or so, after that the mc pulls his head and neck out from between his own butt-cheeks and things take a turn for the better in terms of the amount of retarded nonsense behaviour and mental derangement. It is to be understood that the whole idiocy factor and mental derangement is a purposeful contrivance on the part of the author for the overall story, I personally found it to be beyond to much, while the attempt at clearing up the MCs mental delusions in a satisfactory manner, after more then one and a half books worth of “idjit” just felt like.. ooh well and let’s move on.

This is all good and well until the last chapter and the epilogue where the idiocy again rears it’s disgusting head. First the MC does something really stupid and honestly imo out of character, resulting in consequences laying the framework for a possible continuation of the mainline story in the Celestine Chronicles.

The way the epilogue of the story is written makes the characters involved come across as if after having been badly burnt themselves on a stovetop/hot plate they seem to have totally forgotten everything about said incident. This is where the book ends and so it leaves off on a bad note as I see it.
The degree of stupid is just way to much to be believed and the last part just ended up, story wise, dipping these two books back into fubar territory.

Now throughout the ordeal of reading these two books I nearly constantly kept thinking “oh wtf are you doing” and “no one that supposedly smart can be that stupid” and exclaiming it out loud in some form multiple times. The amount of these occurrences so outnumbered the positives like laughing etc that it just dipped these 2 books into the negative.

Narration:

The two audio narrators performance was excellent throughout this book imo and the overall audio quality seemed high to me.

Technical quality of the work:

Honestly just positives here, It was good. I can not recall any obvious issues but then again I highly doubt the narrators and their production crew would have allowed for such since the book not only reflects on the author but them as well. So overall it seemed professional enough to me which sadly can not be expected nowadays even for audiobooks.

Narration & Technical quality of the books where their only redeeming feature.

Future:

I now wonder if the author is going to leave this story world as is or if we will be seeing more books in the setting, one merging this side story into the main storyline or more side stories expanding on the whole even more, because honestly this book seemed far from an ending to me where the overarching story is concerned.

I can only recommend this the second book and the first one in this arc, to such readers as are in search of stories with verily flawed MC’s.

End of thoughts on this offering by Cebelius.

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