5 hours of torture!

To be clear, the 5 hours of torture was the first 5 hours of the book, which actually could have been condensed into 30 minutes of story building. Every person who has read this book has read the previous books, so we all know what happens to the proposed bad guys in the end.



Even better, for 2 whole hours we got to enjoy the detailed description of the main character going through the class testing process, i.e. the class torture trials, just to pick a class that wasn't even on the cover of the book. worse, it didn't matter after the halfway point, which makes the second half of the book almost a completely different book altogether.



I am not trying to be mean, but why spend so much effort building up a world where we know what eventually happens to the bad guys anyway. all it does is makes whatever choices the main character does seem trivial. he could have planned an epic war with the mages college using dragons and space ships, and yet it wouldn't have mattered because we all know what happens.



however, the reason why it is three stars instead of 1 is because the second half of the book is the actual quality that should be a Dakota kraut book. You give me half a good book, I give you half the stars.



they should have dragged the story out a lot more with the content that made up the second half of the book, because there was some much potential to exploit. Not to mention that the story arc is told from a perspective that hasn't been seen before.



and at the very end... just no. don't try to play these two characters off as arch enemies, because they are not opposite sides of the same coin. they are in fact very similar characters, and most people won't buy the fact that you are playing them off as enemies just because one chose an enemy side and one didn't. Especially considering the main character in the other books worked with the enemy on multiple occasions.