The Samsara Crucible

The Menocht Loop, Book 4

By: Lorne Ryburn, caerulex

Narrated by: Joe Hempel

Length: 16 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

Enter Eternity.

Ian ascends, finding a world unlike anything he has ever known. Eternity is a harsh place where immortals go to live forever. Immortality is as much blessing as curse, with infinite planes of existence to be explored and plundered, but scarce ways to find a final end.

Ian can’t rest. Back home, the Infinity Loop promises the destruction of the world. With the help of unlikely allies, Ian must find a way to destroy the technology, and soon, before its ruination reaches critical mass.

©2022 Lorne Ryburn, caerulex (P)2022 Podium Audio

Interesting with outstanding performance

The story's pace is sometimes not consistent but the content itself makes up for it.
The story, creativity, and imagination is eclectic with a unique set of abilities.
It feels different from the first 3 books with a slight change type, but in a good way for me.

The reader as usual keeps outperforming his previous with more vivid characters and accents!

Same series same quality

If you liked the first 3, you’ll like this one. 😁

Amazon has deleted all of my reviews, banned me from creating new ones, and no matter how many email addresses and social media accounts I try, nobody can tell me why. Just crying out into the void here.

Ok I'm really enjoying this series, bravo.

I love the writing in the series, love the unique magic systems, the world events keep pulling me in and the character relationships and development are crafted to great detail. I am very satisfied with everything that has happened during this series. Book 4 is all about the ascendant realm and the journey has been quite entertaining. A lot of authors could learn a few things from this authors. ONTO to book 5!!!

a dream world with many inhabitants

I love seeing so many different perspectives and feel I grow as a person while listening to such books

Still going strong

If you read all the other books in this series. Then you will not be disappointed

Too short but enjoyable

If you have been listening to this series then this book is good but disjointed feeling. I would not recommend reading this book if you have not read the others, a lot of the context is missing without the other books.

Pro: the Storie progressed in ways I didn’t predict so it stayed interesting.
The characters were well developed

Cons: compared to others in this series, this book seemed to stop at an odd spot and all the books seem to be getting progressively shorter which bugs me.
The environments were a little disjointed and the descriptions seemed to either get less descriptive or was glossed over more towards the end of the book

I have this a mid story rating rather that a 4 or 5 star because it felt like the writer was counting pages/words towards the end of the book and had to cut it off so they had contents for another book. When the first book is close to 20 hours (when listened to) and the last book was between 10 and 13 hrs. I just felt shorted on the content.

Great continuation

While I still like book 3 as my favorite, this one is a great continuation. Ian finally makes it into eternity and it's definitely not what I think anyone was expecting. We're introduced to a slew of new characters and planes of existence, which is interesting, but I'm not too keen on everyone being such assholes in the great beyond, however it's no secret that with little to no consequences and basically an eternity of boredom, everyone is a bit on the eccentric side, aka, they're all kind of apathetic assholes. The book makes this very clear multiple times, but it's still jarring to see each time. It doesn't take away from the book. It's just a bit disheartening to see after all the trouble that Ian went to get into eternity. The narrator does a great job as usual and the story progression is as per usual. If you liked the previous books then you'll like this one. Highly recommend this series. I'm really liking it!

Beyond worth it!

I found the first book and took a chance on it on a whim, and I’m extremely glad I did! This book series literally just gets better and better, and I cannot wait for more!

Immortality ruins another series

I tried to give this one an honest chance given that I've made it this far but the warning signs were clear from the first couple chapters.

First of all giving your protagonist immunity from death has very rarely been done well. Suffice to say this book is not the exception.

Team up with the monstrous antagonist from the previous books? Could be okay in theory. The author tries to humanize her but it's not enough. Ultimately she's a heartless dictator who abused her magic powers to enthrall entire nations of defenceless average people for her personal gain. She wouldn't blink at the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of innocents just to gain an inch. Why is she still alive? You can't humanize that.

Finally you've got supposedly smart characters making the most irrational decisions because plot. Oh sorry because it felt right *eye roll*.

I'm officially done with this series.

A bit disappointing

If you’ve come this far you might as well get this one too. But this book suffers from smart characters doing dumb things “because plot.”