I wanted to enjoy this book, I really did. But alas, I did not. I seriously considered giving this book one star, but I honestly have trouble doing so for a book I did finish to its end because one star to me means it is pure crap and by finishing it, there must have been something in there that convinced me to not put it aside and read something different.

Now the concept being this book is unoriginal. Many other books follow the script of someone in the real world suddenly finds themselves in a mystical realm. The Narnia Chronicles did this as did the Landover Series, the Spiderwick Chronicles, and the Inkheart Trilogy. If I give it more thought, I am sure to come up with many more books like this. While the concept is not original, it does mean it is a script that works to inspire so many to follow it. So I certainly do not fault the author for it and in fact it was an aspect that helped draw me into reading this book.

However, the author in his mind must have had a good reason to write this book in the present tense. Unfortunately, I never figured out this reason and it only served to make reading it disconcerting and distracting. I often caught my brain attempting to translate it into past tense in the course of the read and this prevented me from truly immersing myself into the book.

In addition, the action scenes were quite disappointing. Reading a police report would be more exciting than the majority of the action in this book. They both state the details of what might have happened, but in a stale and dull manner. The settings for the action he created were all good settings, but time after time, the author failed to make it exciting and memorable.

One term I greatly dislike that people seem to overuse is deus ex machina. In fact, whenever you are dealing with magic in a book, the likelihood of it appearing is just that much more as magic is a great way to solve all of life's problems. For this reason, I tend to have a bit more leniency towards its use in a fantasy-related book. But in this book it seemed so overwhelming that it passed my threshold of tolerance in it to make me feel the need to invoke the deus ex machina card. It reached a point where I started to not care about what happened in scenes as I knew the main character was just going to use magic and continue on his way. A situation seems helpless? Let's use magic and let the deus ex machina move us along to the next scene. Do I care about what happens to the characters in the next book? Not really, I'm sure the main character is going to use his magic and deus ex machina will do its thing.

In summary, I don't want to say this was a bad book. It did have its moments. But when I ask myself if I would recommend this book to anybody, my answer is no I would not. If you are looking for a book in which somebody from the real world finds themselves in a mystical realm, there are far more other books out there I would recommend you reading before this one.