The Savior's Champion

I bought the book because it was on sale, I like Jenna's YouTube channel, and so I was curious to see the work in itself.
I have a rating system for fiction books so here it goes.
1. Did I put the book down?
Not really. I am almost blind, so I read with text to speech software that sounds a bit annoying. So if a book is well written, and the pacing is good, and the story is interesting, it will sound good even with a robot reading it. Sidenote, I had no cash for the audiobook so...I only paused my reading because I had to sleep. I was maybe going to DNF, but I felt like picking it up again just to see. So in all fairness, I read it in 2 sittings, it gets the star. Good sentence flow.

2. What about the characters?
Here I have an issue. The main characters were unrealistically perfect. Yes, Tobias had to kill, but we are all used to killings in fiction aren't we? It was a gladiator-like contest. The killings did not make me think he was flawed in the slightest. What flaws did he have? There was not much realism here, and I cannot give that star.

3. What about structure?
I suppose I can give half a start here. It was well paced, yes it was, but it was predictable. No I don't remember other reviews. It was easy to figure it all out, too easy, and that is a huge no no for me. I love it when I cannot predict things. I'm not talking just about the big reveal, everything was easy. Half a star for good structure.

4. How was the writing?
It was good. Some strange word choices here and there but everyone is allowed to have their own style. I can give it a star. I appreciate the effort she put into this aspect of the novel.

5. Overall subjective stuff?
I am not the target audience. This is for straight women, I'm ace. I can give it half a star because it had some good representation, but...this had too much love stuff, the love was very focused on the physical aspect of romance, and I don't give a....

All in all, this is very commercial, and I can see the appeal to younger, straight girls. There were a lot of shirtless dudes running around and killing each other. Great. It's fine, not for me.

Well, I did not enjoy it. Really didn't. And the ending didn't make me feel any better.

Sorry Jenna.

I liked the length of the book and read through it quickly because I wanted to find out more about the plot and the world. The challenges were a mixed bag. Some were interesting while others very obvious, some were not that imaginative where I might had seen something similar in a made for cable movie.

I don't read fantasy anymore, so I was fine if you didn't fit into some of the established patterns of the genre, such as not describing your magic system at all. I'm also not into romance so some of the predictable plot points were okay with me since I haven't read them 100 times before.

My only real complaint is Jenna writes men as she imagines they must talk privately when women aren't around. Sorry, we might think with our dicks sometimes but we don't actively talk about them as if they were some independent part of our selves where our sense of identity is kept. Guys who do talk about their dicks like that in front of other guys are few and far in between because that gets you shunned: it's silly and pathetic. I realize that my view is a contemporary western/American view point, but that brings me to another thing I didn't like. The dialogue was very modern. While that helped make the characters approachable, it also made me think of the characters as contemporary people, almost like a group of people larping. The line ‘worst armor ever' made me think of Simpsons comic book guy, which was immersion breaking.

I'm not going to comment too much on the characters. Tobias was fine, except a bit too ‘perfect' in his relationship with Leila. It felt like some wish fulfillment going on here, but perhaps that's an element of romance novels, don't know-don't care. Leila was fine, beautiful woman who is secretly a deadly bad ass, but nothing new there either. The erotic or sex dream scenes were okay, but seemed like they were in there for either shock or to keep the reader interested. Since I'm not a romance reader I don't know how they were supposed to be, but they came off as tame and the fact that ‘nothing really happened' between the love interests was disappointing.

Overall, the story was ‘meh'. The fact that Tobias would get seriously injured, but still be able to fight reminded me this was a story that had a plot to get through. If it was all good because of healing magic, then the magic needed to be explained more, perhaps with limitations. I get that there is a lot of hidden things driving the story on Leila's side which will be the focus of the second book. I doubt I'll read it.