Good evening everybody! This is Aifos coming to you alive from nowhere in particular, with a book recommendation! So, A Chronicle of Lies is a pretty neato book. The basic promise is a pretty standard isekai adventure; a dude living a regular life doing regular life things has what should have been a fatal accident, and wakes up in a fantasy world. So far so normal. The first thing that might immediately jump out at you upon reading, though, is that the book is quite a bit darker than you find with a usual isekai story. From my experience at least, isekai stuff is usually pretty lighthearted, but this one is most definitely not. That alone creates an interesting take on the genre, as the protagonist deals with the existential crisis of waking up in a fantasy world that most isekai stories totally skip over. However, in my opinion at least, the real draw of the story doesn't come from its premise, but rather the protagonist himself. Now, we all now how mental illness is usually written in a story; it's either treated as a generic "madness" that makes people super violent, or it's romanticized as something beautiful. While the former is definitely more damaging than the latter, the latter is also very damaging and dehumanizing to people struggling with these things. The thing that I really enjoyed about A Chronicle of Lies is that the protagonist is schizophrenic, and it doesn't treat his mental illness as either of these things. It's treated as a problem, something that this character grapples with, but also (while he does act out sometimes) it doesn't turn him into a raving lunatic. He's a normal person, with normal thoughts, emotions, and feelings, but he's also a schizophrenic, and this is a problem that he grapples with. We get inside his head, and see how his thought processes work--we see things in a way that make sense to him, that also make sense to us. Now, I don't know anyone with schizophrenia irl, but at least from what I can tell, it seems to be handled respectfully in this book, and I really appreciated that. Now full disclaimer, I wasn't actually able to finish this book--some irl stuff came up while I was reading it that made me have to put it down, but at least as far as I read, it was a very good read, and I would highly recommend it if anyone's looking for a good book. When I read it, I was provided a word doc, but I believe it's available to read on Royal Road. I think at least part of it is free to read on there, so if you have the time, no reason to not give it a look! [b][u]Tl;dr? Here's my point.[/b][/u] A Chronicle of Lies is good book. You should take a looksie. But that's all for now folks! Jambuhbye!