Worth the Candle by cthulhuraejepsenMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
It took me a really long time to get into this–like, 200,000 words. It starts out as not terribly interesting self-insert RPG fantasy; the magic was all pretty run-of-the-mill, I didn’t like the protagonist, and the other characters all seemed one-dimensional and tropey.
But like. It gets really good. I’m not sure how intentional the beginning was–like maybe on some level it was supposed to be kind of a boring level 1 D&D adventure? But as it goes on you get:
- excellent magic and worldbuilding (what would you do with the ability to edit souls? or a library that contains all books that will ever be written?)
- lots of fun meta-narrative deconstructiony stuff
- really good characters and interpersonal dynamics. Gradually the characters move from tropey to real and fully fleshed out and it just feels like, yes, these are exactly the dynamics you’d expect to come up when you have a small group of really different people trying to save the world together.
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