Paige A. Cook

I picked up a copy of Paige A. Cook‘s Kingdom of Endless Slumber as an Amazon freebie.

Isadora has been possessed by demons for as long as she can remember. While the rest of the world sees her as a misguided, bipolar trainwreck to be medicated into silence, death has other plans for her.

Plunged into a new world where beings have horns, scales, and tails–Iz must learn to control her new dark powers. As the first Necromancer to live in Bellesberry for 100 years, she has her work cut out for her. She’s lived her entire life on auto-pilot being unable to take the reigns back from the demonic entities who lived inside of her. By some miracle, in this new realm, she is free of them. Free to be herself. Too bad she doesn’t know who that is yet. Much to her luck, she lands square in the camp of an adventurers’ party! Looking past the blue-skin and horns, they are incredibly alluring with human-enough features.

The rag-tag group of friends welcomes Iz to join the group. Their company includes an atheist cleric, two orc “sorcerers,” and a whirlwind of chaotic attraction that Iz has never experienced before, especially in this quantity. Will Iz find herself swept up in discovering a new place she feels like she belongs or will her past demons catch up to her all too quickly?

“Fuck. I’ve been Isekai’d.”

Look, it’s finals week. I am super stressed. I purposefully chose a book that looked like it would be utterly and deliriously ridiculous (in a good way) for the sheer diversion it could provide. And, at first, this book delivered. I was enjoying the light fem-dom nature of it. I liked the heroine. I was intrigued by the possible harem participants. The anime-style guild adventure (complete with magic buffs and declarative magic) was working. At first.

I was annoyed at the anachronism, true. Every time references to corn chips, cheerleader outfits, bikinis, and such showed up in a non-earth world with no obvious contact between the realms, I was pulled out of the narrative. But it was fine. I wanted a silly distraction. That was the point.

Then, the author seemed to just give up. There came a point when things stopped making sense. I thought I was missing chapters or something; the plot started jumping so abruptly. I still don’t know why the group went to the Stone King, for example, or if they succeeded with whatever the plan had been. Or when that plan was made.

This started out as a safe 3-star read. It ended at about 1.5.