Strange diary

A nice take on a story of time looping. I found it very engaging and have bought the second book as I want to know how it plays out. Hence in my opinion it's well written and performed.

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Fresh Take on the Time Loop

Interesting take on time loop progression, good thought given to mechanics and solid world building.

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1 person found this helpful

Nothing really happens

I like time loops but the problem with this one is it is set in a fantasy town in the middle of nowhere which leaves the protagonist with not a lot to do. There are things to investigate but they are an hour or two ride away by horseback. There isn't much going on in the town for a 1 day time loop.

If the loop was 3 days or a week it would leave more possibilities but this is very limited. The best bits of the book relate to the backstory of how the characters came together because more can happen then. The entire book covers one day which starts late anyway because he wakes up hungover.

Groundhog day skipped a lot of this BS and whizzed through whereas this book goes over each day and many of them are very samey. The protagonist never has a fun/wild day or does anything crazy. It's just "I heard about monster, I investigate monster." "I heard about goblins, I investigate goblins."

I don't know why I didn't vibe with this one. It was competently written and well narrated but I never cared for the characters.

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1 person found this helpful

Thoroughly enjoyable time loop fantasy

I really enjoyed this and my main complaint is that it ended so soon!

Excellent narration from Baldtree, a well conceived system of magic, a likable protagonist, and just enough world building to keep you intrigued as things get uncovered. I look forward to the next installment!

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I hope this is not the end

While sometimes the book was bit hard to follow, this was definitely one of my favourite time-loop based progression fantasy novels. The world had a lot of history and mysteries, many of them not solved before the end of the trilogy which gives me hope that there might be follow up books. There is no Harem, no LitRPG elements, and while there are plenty much murdering and even some torture in the books its mostly not detailed enough to be disturbing. One thing to note is that the novel is written as a diary with added pages from other books and first hand accounts from some of survivors of the time loop, the order of the pages is not exactly following the chronological order, and given most of the novels content happens during the time loop, things can get confusing. Especially in the beginning, this novel starts with a rather hard in medias res. The magic system of the books is well detailed if a bit confusing sometimes, and the mc's struggles are fun to listen to. There are bit too many "fateful encounters" and lucky events in the novel, but it can be chucked up to the mc having some kind mysterious luck blessing. Really my biggest problem is that the books ended before resolving the party's side quests, and the fate of the big bad evil. There really should be a 4th book. If you like this novel I would also recommend reading Mother of Learning by nobody103 . There is also new series by the same author called Primal Wizardry which happens a century after Dear Spellbook.

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Meh

A waste of money, best avoided. A lot happened, but the story went nowhere.

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no good

no back ground, don't know what is happening, a waste of time, will not recommend this,

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Boring

Not what I expected. Had hopes for a fun but exciting story but it nope.

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Pretty poor

The story is confused, it jumps around in time and although it refers to the protagonist being stuck in a loop on occasion the story doesn’t say what the loop is until half way through.
The length of the loop, doing anything that involves the loop, and what the loop is or does at all doesn’t take place until about the three quarter mark.
The protagonist, although he is stuck in a time loop, has zero progression or benefit from the situation until after that point also.
Imagine if Mother of Learning was badly written, started a week into the time loop, jumped around in time without warning, had a weird time scheme so you don’t know if an aside chapter takes place a week, a year, a thousand years ago, at the same time as the main story, or in the future is unknown as you don’t know when ‘now’ is or how they relates in time to the time of the main story, and was written in the format of a thousand year diary where some of the pages were shuffled.
There was a nice story later on about the forming of the world and magic and the gods. That chapter was the only good part.
Skip this story as it doesn’t work for anything you’re looking for.
There are way better books than this one which do the same job and tell the same story.
At least the narrator is competent.

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