The story isn’t particularly innovative. It feels a lot like Ready Player One had a baby with He who fights with monsters, but it lacks the pizazz of either of those pieces of work. I think I would have given it a 3 star or even 4 if there hadn’t been some weird racial subtext. At one point the author refers to the way a character is speaking as “like a ghetto black guy”. There are some other, less blatent, moments that could easily be read as sexist or racist but I was honestly just trying to enjoy the book and not listen to it critically. This is the sort of thing I read to just tune out the world a bit, and unfortunately my disconnect with the authors lens was jarring enough at times that I had a difficult time doing that. I may still read the second book, but I’m not really chomping at the bit for this one. The pacing was ok, there is a scene where torture is being described in an extremely graphic way yet the author is scared to talk about sex with the same rawness. Why describe something horrific at an adult level and yet something beautiful we skip over and treat with shame? Perhaps this is just telling us about the character’s lens, but I think this is given more credit to intention then is due for this material. Anyway, if you’re desperate for litrpg described in a way that is fairly obvious then this’ll do.