The Dark Paladin

Most people know Vasily Mahanenko through his Way of the Shaman books, which are probably the most popular LITRPG on Amazon right now. His brand new series, Dark Paladin, however, I find is a better written and much more complex book (series, but unless you read Russian, you can't get the second book).The premise is that the entire world is just a 'game' and when you die, you might just wake to the real world, provided you've done something worthwhile in your life to achieve this. The real world, as it is, is modeled after a fantasy RPG. Those people who 'awake' to the real world choose a class to train in (Mages, Paladin's, Rouge, etc). But to train, you first have to survive the Academy. And thus begins the book.Yea yea, we've seen this already about a dozen times (in my case over forty times, which is the number of LitRPG's I've read). However, how Manhanenko creates the logic of his world building and how he dies pretty much everything together somehow makes a lot of sense and is, perhaps, one of the more unique LitRPG world building efforts I've seen yet in the genre.The setting is reminiscent of the Hunger Games where characters are put into a massive arena and forced into a last-man-standing type of conflict.Somehow, the whole thing works (when you read LITRPG, you kind of have to take your suspension of disbelief to a whole new level ). It's a promising read and, considering I've powered through dozens of bad, bad, bad LITRPG's, one of the betters in the genre.