The Two Week Curse

By: Michael Chatfield

Narrated by: Todd Menesses

Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's Summary

Thrust into an unknown, unwanted situation, most would feel panic, fear anger, and fall into chaos. Erik and Rugrat are not immune to those feelings, but they have stepped into chaos so many times, it is simply a different challenge.  

Two weeks ago, Erik lost his legs and his arm.   

Today he got a message.   

"You have been randomly selected to join the Ten Realms. One may choose to ascend the Ten Realms, thereupon making a request to the Gods of the Realms. Only those who are Level 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 may ascend to the next realm. Fortune favors the strong!”  

For a retired combat medic and Marine Recon sniper, the Ten Realms offer a clear challenge and sense of purpose that they had only found on the battlefield.   

How much trouble can you get into in a new realm?

©2018 MC PUBLICATIONS INC. (P)2019 MC PUBLICATIONS INC.

Where's the rest of the series?!?!?!

FINALLY!!! An author that actually sounds like he knows what it's like to have been in the $*** and low crawled out of it, or at least knows some who have. I have never laughed as hard listening to a book as I did for the first 20 minutes of this one, the conversations and actions are exactly like some of the things my old squad mates and I used to do and say to each other all the time back in my time in service. The story line is awesome and while it moves pretty fast at times the narrator doesn't try to rapid fire the words out just to make up for a lack of skill to voice the urgency.

These two make an awesome tandem in a wonderful story line. Now Amazon just needs to saddle up and get the next two books in this series on audible so we can enjoy the others.

53 of 57 people found this review helpful

I had to send it back.

I really wanted to like this book. Maybe my expectations were too high, I don't know. I thought I read a review that said they thought this author "Had been in the military and really knows his stuff". Then, in the first few mins of the book, I hear one of the characters complain that the base is called base D instead of something cool like bravo or delta. That was my first red flag. Delta is just the phonetic letter for "d". Anyone that has been in the military should know that. When I was in the Army, we were in Charlie company, but we didn't write out the word "Charlie" we wrote C co. Anyway, I just felt the author was trying too hard to make the guys sound like authentic military guys by using every catchphrase he has ever heard in a military movie or book. A lot of people really like this book I just am not one of them.

7 of 7 people found this review helpful

Better than Expected

I love the LitPRG genera, but it's become absolutely saturated in the last year with sub-par, self-published books with the same rehashed plots and mechanics. For that reason I didn't go into this book with high expectations, I expected it to just be a generic time filler, but while the book was not perfect, it was refreshingly different and very enjoyable.

PLOT:
The book is about 1/3 adventuring and 2/3 base building. Honestly I didn't expect any base building, so I was surprised by this. I personally like that style of LitPRG, but others might not. Some sections of this become a bit dull as I think too much time was spent on the mundane aspects of city management, but most of it is good. There are plenty of scenes outside of this base building, but they are all focused at the beginning and end of the book. There are some interesting sub plots from the first part of the book that do get followed up on in the end, which is nice because in a lot of LitRPG those things sort of get forgotten, The Land series is a prime example of that. I don't want to give up too much about the plot, because it's hard not to spoil it, but I will say the story does not proceed in the way I was expecting.

I should mention pacing and chronological order is a problem for me with this book. Sometimes it feels like a month of activity will go by, taking up a dozen chapters, only to be told later the amount of time passed was 5 days. Things seem to be completed in unrealistically fast time. This would be OK if there was some reasoning behind it, but we are lead to assume time flows normally. Some mentions are made later about the amount of time it takes to, for example, build a building, but it feels like too little too late and it still does not explain how you can do things like turn farmers into grizzled veterans in a matter of days. The worst part for me though is feeling like the timeline got messed up.... almost like entire pages were misplaced. Sometimes it feels like they are talking about something they are planning to do in the future as if it already happened, or that they are discovering things they should have already known about. Sometimes it feels like things happen more than once. I actually wonder if the Audible app messed up the chapters or something, I will have to re-read it to be sure.

CHARACTERS:
There are two main characters, which is a bit different for the genera, as most LitRPGs focus on a single player. They are a bit different than your typical MC as they come in with a military background. The other characters are mostly decent, with a couple that stand out. Character development is not the best in this book, but it's pretty good for the genera.

WORLD AND GAME MECHANICS:
Lots of new concepts and ideas in this book, most of them pretty cool. Unfortunately some of them don't feel consistent or feel completely thought out. Some of the mechanics are explained over and over to the point of being annoying while others are barely touched on. Most of the mechanics and systems are really interesting though, it's just some of them feel awkward or unfinished. Most of it is not major to the story, just slightly annoying. Some examples are being given a list of resources in the city management screen, but resources are never talked about in the story, there really is no resource management, it just feels like there are infinite resources. Another is how skill books are consumed when they are used, yet they want to build a library where people can go and read them, making it seem like they have infinite uses. Just lots of little strange things like that.

WRITING QUALITY:
It falls somewhere in between self-published and a traditional published book. There are mistakes and awkwardness, It's not so much there are glaring errors, it's more that there are a lot of odd wording choices, and scenes and dialog that could have been executed better. There are times where the writer goes on odd tangents or randomly returns to the same topic discussed a few paragraphs earlier, like when someone is telling a story and remembers an earlier part of the story, so they mention it before continuing with their original train of thought. Again nothing terrible, but it just felt like it could have used some more time in editing. This is pretty common in this genera, especially since many of the books coming out are self published or translated.

NARRATION:
Pretty good, but I took a star off for the bad Chinese accents. Many of the residents of this world are apparently Chinese, but the narrator uses the same cheesy accent for all of them, making it hard to differentiate. The accent he uses sounds more like the type of fake accent someone would use to make fun of a Chinese person. His other accents are fine, he has a decent southern sounding one, and he is not a bad narrator, I just don't think this narrator was well suited to a book with so many Chinese characters.

71 of 79 people found this review helpful

Perfection

First off, how have I never heard of todd menesses before. His narration was absolutely fantastic. The start was a little slow but after that it took off like a rocket. Absolutely amazing storyline wile avoiding most of the clichés. Would definitely recommend.

Note: I paid for this book with my own damn money, and this is a REAL honest review.

53 of 61 people found this review helpful

Story is great. Narrator is meh.

The story has you on the edge of your seat the whole time, just purchased the second book in the series and can't wait for the third and fourth to reach audible! My only complaint is the way the narrator ends each chapter, he puts waaaaay to much emphasis on the last three words of each chapter (ex: and HE CLOSED the BOOK.) It took my out of the story and made me roll my eyes every single time. 5 stars all around otherwise, still recommend regardless.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

Not into crude and vulgar, skip to chapter 6

I almost gave up on this audiobook after listening to the first several chapters. Michael Chatfield's character building amounted to having the mercenary team spew out almost constant vulgarities as well as Todd Menesses mimicking most of the team as dumb southerners or New Jersey mafia wannabes. I don't mind foul language but when it makes up a lot of the dialog in the beginning, it comes off as assaulting my listening experience and makes me to not want to listen to a 20 hour story like that. It was so bad, I couldn't understand how this book got so many 4/5 stars reviews?

I decided to at least wait until the MCs were transported to another world and was pleased to find that while the foul language still occurred on occasion, it tamped down quite a bit. I am glad I held out since what followed was a good story and even the litRPG stats sections were written and performed in such a way as to minimize what tends to be the bane of listening to many litRPG novels. I also appreciated how the author ended the book without leaving loose end cliff hangers while alluding to more to come from those closed loose ends in the future.

Todd Menesses' performance was quite good after the story moved the MCs off-world.

I'll be continuing this series.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

Writing

So the story is pretty good, though it’s similar in many ways to other lit rpg’s, it has a few things that give it some uniqueness. The writing itself is pretty annoying though, the author makes himself redundant often. Literally using the same words to describe the same thing over and over. The characters also have the same revelations over and over, claiming that until this point they did things differently (but no they didn’t). The author also starts the characters of as honestly a little dumb, a lot aggressive, and very fallible. Which is fine, in fact much preferable to the “character development” the author has them go through. The characters end up being portrayed as sort of idiot savants at first, which would also be ok, however throughout the book the characters don’t make any mistake of consequences. They infer things that shouldn’t have been inferred with the information available to them. They are even essentially worshipped by those around them for their apparently unparalleled generosity and morality as well as their amazingly superior skill, These two character attributes seem to be brought up on several occasions actually, it gets annoying.

12 of 15 people found this review helpful

Great new addition to the LitRPG space!

The TLDR; loved this story, narrator and character development. The plot is really good, but the character development is the shining point here. I really felt like I got to know the two lead characters. For those who wish to know, this isn't a harem nor does it have sexual situations (lewd content). Neither harems or graphical sex dissuade me from a good story and characters, but there are some that do. It is a LitRPG with stats and development.

Character development is great. Not only for the two lead characters but for the entire cast. The characters that are adults are adults. No overdramatic situations that seem so prevalent in our LitRPG books. The deep situations that pull on our Leads are well deserved and have their place then they don't. But, the memory of it stays with your understanding of the character without needing to be brought up again and again. I love that... LOVE THAT.

And the story... I really fell into the story. So much that I'm getting the books 2 and 3 so I can read them because I can't wait anymore (it's been like 6 hours since I finished... too long in my books), Great plot progression, kept me interested and waiting to see how things turned out.

And the last glue to this great piece of audio work is the narrator. Great job in bringing all the characters to life, fleshing out the small nuances that we all add in our mind if we read the stories, but better... at least for me anyway.

And my one negative would be the really bad jokes. The "pull my finger" variety that has aged to the middle-aged level? Yeah, those. Not bad enough to be "so bad it's good", just mediocre bad... the ones you can see coming from a mile away, like a really slow car crash... you wince and cringe, trying to look away but you can't... screaming "my god, no! Can't they see how bad this is going to be?"... but it happens and it's just... not that funny. I can't lie, a couple of them made me chuckle. And that's really my only negative, not enough to remove a star, cause it's really just my opinion.

So, I loved it! Can't wait for the next books, adding it to my wait list of epic series to follow.

31 of 40 people found this review helpful

Good story, writing needs work.

The narration is good but could use a little more bite during combat.

The story is also good but needs work. There are times when it focuses too much on little things then skips ahead days just to progress.

The main nitpick I have is how much repetition the author uses. Every other chapter is filled with repeated words. An example would be a paragraph that has the word body in it four times, twice in the same sentence. The very next chapter has the word city in it four times. It makes me cringe and you can hear that the narrator doesn't like it either.

It's a shame because the story is really good and I like the main characters. But, it hurts my soul to hear the same word used over and over.

8 of 10 people found this review helpful

He Hit it Out of the Park on His First Try

I've listened to a lot of LITRPG audiobooks and have developed a specific like to certain ways of presenting those worlds ... and, Michael Chatfield more than successfully did this. He brings to life the transitioning, adapting, and growth of a "player" quite well, without overly complicating things with stat updates, etc. It's a well-thoughtout book that's written in an easy going manner. I'm sure that future books in the series will transport us equally well.

Now, as for Todd Menesses ... I can honestly say he's good. I was a little worrisome at the beginning, as I couldn't really tell the differences between Erik's and Rugrat's voices, but as you progress it becomes quite clear. It's subtle ... and that's what Todd brings to the table in his many voices.

Well worth the credit ... ummm, credits ... as, I'll be buying the whole series.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

a few editing errors

great story performance was good there were a few editing errors where a scroll seemed to turn into a book couple of other minor things like that. I did really enjoy the whole thing though

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

😁 I love these books!

love the book, the narrator, the accents (🤣 Rugrat!) - just fantastic! Can't wait to listen to the rest 😍

2 of 3 people found this review helpful

5 stars

honestly if I could rate it higher I would started slow then bam I couldn't put it down 20 hrs done in 2 days .

combat vets in a litrpg world

nice angle on the litrpg genre. a thoroughly engaging performance with some extremely likeable main characters led by their strong honest soldiers moral compass.

the two week curse

first of all let me apologise to the two offers because the beginning of this review is going to sound awful and here it is the best way to describe this book is you can't judge a book by its cover I avoided this book for a while because of its cover and after ran out of stuff to read I came back to it and I am so glad I did halfway through the first book I purchased the second book and look forward to the rest of the books in this series good read with a good storyline and an interesting twist on the litrpg storyline well done guys very impressed

Recommended, but some sentences are painful.

Deeply recommend this book. Great story, and performance, but, and a big but, so menu times some paragraphs are painful to listen to.

You should never use the same word(s) in two consecutive sentences, unless they for effect.
(Eg, but, and a big but)

Many places you had lines like:
Erik’s feet hurt because of Erik’s shoes, thought Rugrat whilst looking at Erik’s shoes. Rugrat decided Erik’s shoes needed to go.

A small grimace each time hit lines like that.
Please use ‘them’, ‘it’, ‘they’, or just another word meaning the same thing, when it is obvious what the subject is.

Eternal waiting curse.

I love this RPG-LIT storyline and have thougherly enjoyed the first 2 books on Audible but have been waiting for 3rd and 4th realm with deteriorating patience that is very frustrating please please publish on Audible the next books in the series am desperate to hear the 3rd and 4th realm.

Bit of a slow start but turns into Korean manga

Been reading alot of manga some korean to, translate to english. This book is descripted sutch a world, tempering body manipulation and so on, quite intresting. It acculy made the manga i read before more easy to understand the process of "leveling" the Korean way (tempering) . Though the world is more complex with realms and normal leveling (lv 5 etc) , Village interface. Now onwards to The next book

Excellent

Really enjoyed this, looking fwd to the next one, a bit different to other litrpg books which makes a refreshing change

a new favourite

this has quickly become a new favourite series of mine and I can't recomend it enough!