On paper, Jason has a great life. He attends a prestigious private school on scholarship and his parents are reasonably well off.
Yet life hasn't been easy for Jason. He has spent most of high school being tormented by both the students and faculty and his parents are never home.
Frustrated and alone, his one escape has always been video games. In-game, he can feel the type of power and freedom he lacks in his day-to-day life. Fortunately, a new virtual reality game (the first of its kind) has just been released, which promises the opportunity for an even greater escape.
Once he begins playing, Jason quickly finds himself on the path to becoming the game's villain. In the process, he also starts to suspect that there is something unusual going on within the game.
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[Chris ran desperately through the dead forest]***
(Amazon Digital Services, 21 January 2017, first published 23 July 2016, 527 pages, ebook, #popsugarreadingchallenge 2019, a LitRPG book, bought from @AmazonKindle)
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I thought this book was amazing. I need the rest of the series right now. This book reminds me a lot of Ready Player One which is fricking awesome. Take it as a compliment. I just loved the way the book is structured. Jason spends a lot of time in AO and there are very few scenes of him offline. The chapters are split into halves. The first half tends to use a third person narrator to focus on the game being developed, the game studios reaction to Jason's progress etc. The second half of the chapter focuses on Jason as he plays the game and achieves feats unheard of from a new player. This works really well. I loved the way the book explores Jason playing the game, levelling up and becoming a super villain. There's something very realistic about it. This was indulgent pleasure.
