Play Book Tag discussion

I'm actually surprised by the general rating on this book, given that I think his other works are generally much higher rated, and who doesn't like a good time travel/plucked out of time story? I was a little apprehensive that the lower rating meant that I would not enjoy it, but I found it to be the opposite!

While I didn't fall in love with the main character, I still enjoyed his antics well enough. It was fun to go on the journey with him in regards to figure out what was going on, since both him and the reader start out in exactly the same place knowledge-wise of the world that he is in. I adored a lot of the side characters though, especially Ealstan, and I really enjoyed how they helped the main character realize that he had worth and that his friends from his past life were shit lol. So basically lots of good character development, which is my main book kink. But I never fully connected with him either; he felt more like a blank slate that I could project myself onto in some ways (which makes sense since he couldn't remember anything to start with).

What I particularly liked about this book was the fact that it touches on stuff that anyone today would probably have to deal with if traveling back in time that we don't really think about. For example, the main character was trying to think about how to demonstrate that he was a "wizard" (aka from the future), but realized that he had no idea how to actually do that. It's not like any of us know how to build a fridge or a phone or any of that, so without that infrastructure already in place, we would all be fucked in the past. Also, the main character was expecting castles and shit, but had landed during a time before any of that was even a thing, and at least for me, when I think about going back to medieval times, I would have expected castles and would be so confused if I ended up in a time before that.

I was a little bit hmm about the sci-fi/fantasy genre mix. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either, though I don't know that I could explain why I didn't love it. I think it just was really jarring and ended up pulling me out of the story every time all the portals and dimensional travel stuff came up, especially because I was mainly enjoying this story for all the complications related to time travel. I did really like bits of the Handbook that was shown, but I basically just had to handwave the "science" because...yeah, idk what is going on with any of that. The weird sci-fi/fantasy mash-up is what took off some of a star for me, because otherwise I would have probably given it at least 4.75.

I know this author is a big name in fantasy, so I'm excited to read his other ~pure fantasy books (aka Mistborn: The Final Empire) to see if that will also jive with me.