Having recently finished "the slog" in wheel of time, I was having a difficult time getting started on another 1000 page book (not to mention a spot of difficulty acclimating to Sanderson's voice in Gathering Storm, which is more casual than Jordan's) ... so I decided to take a light reading break by breezing through this 400 page ditty by Sanderson. It wasn't for me.

Spoilers follow.

Synopsis: A main character who is a total screw up in the real world is reborn in fantasy England, where his access to modern technology makes him a godlike being. All the men are either afraid of him or idolize him, and the only woman in the book who has significant speaking lines has, by the end of the book, fallen madly in love with him. It reads like a (well executed) teenager's fantasy.

The setting is at once both 1000 years in the future and 1000 years in the past. In the far future, the main character still uses social media and, of all things, websites. In the far past, characters are inconsistent in whether they understand that technology changes as time passes.

The main character is meant to a funny screwball, but I just found him boring. Other examples of humor in the book also fall flat: the book uses the phrase "What if I'm worried about doing a colonialism" and there's an in-world corporate D&I statement that references "the serious issues facing BIAHHIIPOC". These are cringe jokes that would be at home in some teenager's twitter feed.

There are three women characters in the entire book: One actually isn't a woman. One is a wife that has one line and then disappears. And finally, the one woman that has significant time in the book spends the entire book attracted to or in love with the main character. Perhaps most awful of all is the main character's relationship with his ex-girlfriend, who chose to let the main character believe she had died rather than talk about their relationship. Oh, and she was cheating on him the entire time they were together. But he still rescues her because he's a standout guy and after that never thinks of her again because he has a hot new medieval girlfriend.