Reading with teafortiffany

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“It takes me two weeks to die, locked in my own dungeon.”

Django Wrexler, How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, First Line

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Do you like my new banner’s I made? I did them in Canva because I keep forgetting to cancel my pro subscription.

ANYWHO

To the actual review! (but also please tell me if the banners are nice?)

I genuinely enjoyed this book, but I don’t believe this is a book for everyone out there. Let me explain why.

This book is based around the idea that a person who has been transmigrated into another fantastical type of world (from Earth) and has been tasked with saving this world from The Dark Lord. Problem is, she keeps dying. Over and over and over. Each time she dies, she goes back to the beginning of when she entered this world and at the beginning of the book we find that she is captured by the current Dark Lord and has been tortured for weeks. And she’s over it.

This is a book that is quite heavily influenced by something commonly seen in anime, manga, and webcomics called Isekai. This involves a person being reincarnated or transmigrated (whichever you’d like) to another world. If you are familiar with the anime/manga scene, this will probably be quite comfortable for you. It’s a fun concept that has been reshaped many times and I’m happy to read a novel with this trope in it. That being said, I don’t know that I’ve personally encountered one that combines both a time loop and a transmigration at the same time.

Something else that’s not quite for everyone, footnotes. They are all over the place in this book and I genuinely enjoyed that. I’m one of those people who constantly think in parenthesis (something I find quite common among many a neurodivergent person, but I’ve never been diagnosed so….jury is out on that one). I always have little side thoughts that accompany my main thought, but aren’t really all the relevant. Just a fun little extra bonus thought. It was so refreshing to read a book where the main character’s inner monologue is just like my own. It’s a little chaotic and scattered but the main point comes through. I felt like the footnotes were a clever way to add in those bonus thoughts without making the actual page look messy. This will be annoying to other people (just look at some of the Goodreads reviews) but to me it’s nice to see.

Finally, it’s a lot of pop culture references and some people might find the main character Davi annoying (I think she’s a delight in a foul-mouthed kind of way). The way I see it, Davi has lived well over 200 lives in this Fantasy realm she has found herself in and, personally, I feel like the excess of pop culture references is just her way of maintaining some kind of connection to what she once was, a normal human with a normal life. Honestly, I don’t normally enjoy that much myself as I’m not really someone who enjoys contemporary fiction. It didn’t bother me. I noticed it because it’s quite hard not to, but I just read the reference and continued on with the story.

I loved it.

Truly and honestly, I can tell you this book was a hell of a good time. I do recognize though that this is not going to be a book for everyone and if you go into it expecting one thing and getting something else, you will not enjoy it (hence some of the Goodreads reviews). But that’s what reviews are for right?! They’re to help you figure out what you want to read and what might just tickle your fancy. This, tickled all the fancies for me. I loved the idea of someone just getting fed up and being like “you know what…villain time” but also you can tell she doesn’t just suddenly decide to lose all morals. There’s a lot of grey area happening in this book but she feels bad when her minions (her words not mine) die and genuinely wants to try to do what’s best for all these people that she’s suddenly become in charge of.

Also, shit goes sideways. And it’s funny.

That’s all for this time friends! I hope you enjoyed this blog post as much as I enjoyed writing it! I’ll see you guys next week!!

BYEEEEE!!!!