I wasn’t immediately hooked on this book. In fact I was rather annoyed with its protagonist in the beginning. Said person is the teenage boy and mage student Zorian Kazinski and at first his grumpy and anti-social mannerisms come off as very unsympathetic. But I must say that I felt like the book already does a pretty good job in character development for Zorian and there are also very good reasons as to why he is how he is and everything just starts making a lot of sense the further you get into the book. 

Plotwise it also starts a little uninteresting with a rather general mage school setting and I found the first about 5 chapters to be rather boring. The plot quickly picks up though when the actual time looping begins which is still fairly early in the book. 

The concept of the time loop is definitely well explored within fiction and there especially are a fair amount of my favorite TV shows that have dabbled with this concept and I think for me it is way more often more hit than miss. This also holds true for this book as we very repeatedly loop over the same month with slight alterations while we slowly gather more and more information. 

During his time loops Zorian meets a lot of distinct and well developed side characters and I feel like almost each of those make the whole thing instantly compelling. My favorite of those is a species of non-humanoids which Zorian interacts quite a lot with and are just a source for a lot of laughs as well as contributing majorly towards the main Mystery of the story. 

Where the book truly shines though is the audiobook narration. Jack Voraces is killing it. One could say that he overperforms but I don’t think so. He certainly gives each character a very unique voice, does a lot with different accents and just conveys a lot of emotion with his tone and way of speaking. Like for example if a character is meant to be annoying, they really, really get annoying! 

I like the narration so much that I will immediately jump into book 2. And if you’re looking for a good audiobook and the mage school trope and time loops are interesting to you, you should absolutely check out this series!