TLDR: If you enjoy good story craft, good sentence craft, characters with real depth, women as more than sex objects, consequences for character action, any level of understanding of the human psyche, or books not written by members of the boys' club pandering to other members of the boys' club, this book is your worst nightmare. If you are a 15-year-old boy who really wants to be a member of the boys' club, you might like this book.

—The Good— Weeks crafted an imaginative world with an ethnically diverse cast of characters and a unique magic system. Following logically from the magic system, the government structure of Weeks' world was intriguing. I also enjoyed reading about the heroes of the Prism War and the gods and wished that there had been more about them (I suspect more details about the gods come in later books). My favorite character, though, was Ironfist, and I wish I could have followed him around throughout the book instead of any of the main characters. Finally, the conception of the plot twist was fabulous and is one of the main contributing factors to the slightly higher rating I have of the plot.

—The Bad— I took notes as I worked through the book on many of the instances of "the bad" and even though I gave up documenting things about ¾ of the way through, it's over 2,500 words long. Yeah. Reading other people's good reviews honestly feels like an elaborate prank.

Let's start with characters. Weeks' four main characters are all cliches and I could have forgiven that if only they were cliches with personalities. They are not. Kip is Weeks' self-insert punching bag character who is fat, naïve, and awkward, all of which we are constantly reminded of. We constantly see him aroused by women and he notices little about them aside from whether they're beautiful or not and what their bodies look like. Despite being such a clumsy and foolish character, he is immensely powerful and somehow manages to contribute significantly to battles that take place later in the book. Kip changes only marginally in his internal world by the end of the book and one of the most significant lines in which we see his change from coward to courageous is one in which he says that he spends more time on his back than a rent girl. Hilarious.

The second main character is Gavin, aka Weeks' ideal self. Gavin is exactly the type of man Kip wishes he could be—attractive, rich, powerful, and charismatic (if you squint and look past all of his terrible character qualities). Gavin doesn't really have a character arc in the book. The way that the reader sees him changes a bit, but he himself does not. He is a stereotypical nearly all-powerful character with very little inner world beyond his secrets and his sort of love for his childhood crush, Karris, though he has no issue maintaining a sexual relationship with his room slave.

The third main character is Karris herself. If you have seen one sexy bodyguard in a fantasy book, you've seen Karris. She is somehow a member of the elite blackguard and also one of the silliest women I have ever read about. Despite being an adult, highly trained professional, and Gavin having broken up with her over fifteen years ago, she is obsessed with him and acts irrationally every time she has a related emotion. Additionally, when she's waking up after a fight and assessing her wounds, the worst part for her is a pimple on her nose, because that definitely makes sense.

The fourth and final main character is Liv. She is, of course, beautiful and is, of course, the object of Kip's affection. Neither of the female main characters can stand on their own—they are the lovers, real or imagined, of the male main characters. Liv is the "you don't know you're beautiful" poor girl who has a heart of gold (except when it comes to other women who aren't her friends. Then she is given carte blanche to call them ugly and sluts.). She is a little less irrational than Karris, but she plays just as stereotypical a role, just one meant for a slightly younger woman.

I already mentioned my dislike for how Weeks treats Kip as a fat character, but that attitude is pervasive even beyond Kip. The descriptions of other fat characters are just as demeaning as those of Kip, perhaps even worse. One woman is described as having a butt that isn't just big but is "actual architecture." But it's not just the bodies of the fat characters that Weeks can't shut up about—it's everyone. Gavin is described as "cutting a nice figure" several times (by adoring women, of course), Karris is described as "skinny, muscular, and bloody" in the heat of a battle because obviously being skinny matters when you're being a badass, and random side characters have their breasts described as massive or saggy or both. In many instances, the characters' bodies become character qualities and are pretty much the only thing we know about them.

While the issue of body-forward writing goes for everyone, it's especially an issue for the female characters. Weeks cannot write a woman to save his life. Weeks' conception of women is limited to attractiveness, body size, period=bad, and stereotypical depictions of women hating pretty women and throwing themselves at pretty men. His portrayals of women are nonsensical and not at all human-like. One of the most hilarious examples of this early on in the book is Karris saying that in her military-issued uniform she flaunts her "hard-earned figure." You know, in the clothes she doesn't get to pick. Weeks literally couldn’t get over how much of a wet dream Karris is to him for long enough to think through whether what he's writing makes sense or not.

Weeks does no better with the internal world of his characters than the external. Despite the amount of gore and difficulty the characters encounter, there is very little said about how it affects them. For example, one of the female characters, who is an adult woman, is punished by being severely spanked while being held captive. Rather than dealing with how demeaning and shameful such an experience would be, Weeks writes her as feeling a bit mad and then shortly after a bit thankful for a pretty dress she's given. Thus, rather than using the opportunity to delve into the character's inner world and add depth and gravity to the story, the situation feels more like Weeks inserting a fetish so everyone (read as: men) can laugh at her while also being a little turned on.

Bad characters are only a symptom of a larger issue of bad writing. Weeks' writing is regrettable beginning to end from word choice to sentence craft to story craft. The prose is functional at best and little else, the dialogue sounds like it was written by an alien imitating human speech, and the exposition is lengthy without providing any sense of bearing in the world. He regularly spends entire paragraphs and pages on things that don't matter at all.

Zoomed out, the story craft in general was nonsensical. We're dropped into the world at a very weird place with a prologue that has no bearing on the rest of the story, followed by about 200 pages of rambling about things that aren't the actual point of the plot. I could not orient myself in the world for far too long despite the fact that the story beats aren't all that original—I've read fantasy books and have seen this all before, but even I had no idea what was happening. Weeks needed an editor to come in and rearrange his story points, because even once the plot made sense it was only because the plot was "prepare for attack, attack, aftermath" and it's pretty hard not to have a direction with that.

On top of that, zoomed in, the sentence craft and word choice could have passed for a fifteen-year-old's second draft. If you told me Weeks started this book at fifteen and just never changed anything, I would say, "Hey, you stole my theory!" because there is no way a grown man wrote this book. No way. Allow me to share with you one of my favorite sentences from the book: "As the six girls took their places—there were no boys in the class—the Prism saw them." No notes lmao.

I could go on about my issues with the book, from the sexual parts that could have been erotic if only they weren't so awkwardly written to the horrific pacing of the introduction of the magic system, but I believe my point has been made. Weeks' intended audience is horny teenage boys and young men who will relate to Kip, pretend they're Gavin, and want to have sex with Karris and Liv as badly as Weeks does, but that is not me. This is one of the worst books I've ever read, on par with self-published books from people who really shouldn't have published their first draft.