Benjamin MedranoReseñas

The MC gets a new chance for a second life in a fantasy world. The goddess at the afterlife counter offers herself as companion.
Slice of life story that takes its time... takes a lot of time and at the end i have way too many open questions. But I like the MC very much and cannot wait to see what happens to her.

Has a good inciting incident that is then squandered.

For someone with a 24 month deadline, our MC is surprisingly chill about being several months being lost by the time we get to the academy. She's surprisingly unconcerned with time in general in fact. If there was any attempt to make it feel like she was trying desperately to save someone it failed. As far as I can tell she's just a girl with serious injuries attending magic school. Where's this drive our antagonist keeps referencing?

Also, her obsession with a girl who she's never even spoken to is creepy. The fact that the emotional catalyst of the opening scene is her worry over this girl and not, say, her parents (who it is made clear she loves) is quite bizarre. We don't even see her find their bodies, they just die off-screen and we're told to care. I mean one of them doesn't even makes an appearance in the story.

Further, I think the writing is getting worse. Ancient Dreams and Lilith's Shadow weren't great but the writing was at least tolerable. Here it feels like almost nothing but telling.
And the repetition, my gosh the repetition. She keeps giving the same information to different people.
Yes, technically they don't know that information, but the audience does and it gets old fast.

The atavism is never explored and given the status of this as a trilogy it seems like this is another Medrano setting I'm doomed to never get the chance to experience outside of a very narrow slice. So many interesting sounding places that there's no way we have the time to explore at the rate this story is progressing.

It's all very depressing.

Dialog needs work.

I think the narration has improved over the previous series, but the dialog is still extremely painful. These characters do not talk like real people--they talk like they're trying to explain things to the audience, not to each other.

I admit that I was 100% drawn to this story by the pretty cover, but the blurb intrigued me as well. This is a story of demons, goddesses, reincarnation, and magic. It is also the story of two women in love in a fantasy world, which we'll never have enough of.

Overall, I enjoyed this story, but - the info dump at the beginning was a little too much. Also, this was really just a short glimpse into the life of these characters, and it didn't quite manage to make me emotionally invested?