I was very pleasantly surprised by this. So far my experience with the litRPG genre has been very hit and miss. This one though can clearly be counted as a winner!

Our protagonist Elaine is a young woman (I believe she was a college student) who died and got reborn into a distant Fantasy world that includes a gaming type skill system. Not all but some of her memories from earth are retained during this process. 

We discover the world through Elaine (single POV) growing up in it and we find out that it is a pretty harsh reality where (aside from constant threats from monsters) slavery is common and everything is under a strict patriarchal order. 

Elaine is a delightful protagonist to follow along. She gives us a great mixture of childish playfulness, youthful rebellion, an unrivaled love for Mangos and strong ideals and principles that she constantly stands up for.

The story itself is also gripping and does take some very unexpected dark turns. As a result the tone can switch in an instant from lighthearted fun to breathtakingly scary. 

My only real complaint lies within the litRPG system. The book very much has points where we get flooded with system messages about every skill leveling and stat leveling up and yes that can get very annoying. 

I do think that it is somewhat cleverly handled here though since the characters have the ability to turn off system notifications. So during a tense scene it never takes you out of the story. That was the thing that made me eventually start hating the probably most famous litRPG “He Who Fights With Monsters”. In this story though once we get some time to relax, system notifications get turned back on, we get flooded with level ups and then we go back to the story. Way better than how HWFWM handles that. 

The audiobook narration for this is very good as well. The narrator Andrea Emmes doesn’t have the biggest range of distinct voices but she does great at emotional delivery especially with our protagonist Elaine. And with audiobooks you can also just speed up through the minutes-long floods of system messages. ;)

I immediately got the second book on Audible and jumped right in!