I was recommended this book as something I might enjoy, and the premise seemed very interesting, so I picked it up gladly and with excitement.

I very quickly realized this is not what I expected, and as the book went on it became more and more obvious it's not for me.

The world building is whimsical, inconsequent and tongue in cheek. The world is basically our own, with a few twists, like for example that people are much more worked up about literature than in our world, for no apparent reason. There's several cults about the authorship of Shakespear's works, for example.

This is a work of literature wherein literature is inexplicably very important to people, and whose main premise revolves around one of the classics; it's just so self-indulgent.

The characters are walking collections of clichés. The villain, especially, is a caricature, perhaps trying to evoke one dimensional villains from old works of literature, and ending up with a hollow shell that feels more like plot device than person.

And the names. Ah, the names. I expect they are supposed to be funny, in a sensible chuckle sort of way, but they did not land with me. There's a character whose name is Jack Schitt, who, you guessed it, is an antagonist. There's a LiteraTec (ie literature police) whose name is Paige Turner. And so on.

Moreover, the book is full of tropes. I seriously have not had such frequent use for TVTropes.org ever before while reading a book. There's examples of:

- Two (!) counts of Stable time loop
- Forgotten phlebotinum (time travel, which seems to be rampant but not used to, for example, solve the question of the authorship of Shakespear's works which is seemingly plaguing the world, until the protagonist suggests it out of the blue at the end of the book)
- Homemade inventions
- Deus Ex Machina

And that's about as many as I have patience to list (mostly because they were the most annoying).

Finally, I understand that the author did not set out to write a serious book and accidentally made it comical: it's meant to be comical. It just did not amuse me at all. If the above sounds like something you could enjoy, by all means, pick the book up as a lighthearted romp full of capers and throwaway literary jokes. For me, though, this is both the first and the last book I ever read in this series.