The Mayor of Noobtown by Ryan Rimmel

TL;DR: Perfect for more Gaming style fans of LitRPG.
Source: NetGalley, thank you so much!

Plot: Jim gets struck by Truck-kun (iykuk), and wakes up in a world of stats and classes. What’s a man to do?
Characters: We have a simple cast in this first book but I really liked Jim and see a lot of potential in Shart.
Setting: A pretty standard fair forest with rundown town. Not the strongest but a good start I think.
LitRPG: This is very much on the RPG side. We have stat blocks and crafting. If you’re not a huge nerd for that you may struggle here.

Summary:

It could be worse. You could be stuck with a literal shoulder demon.

For Jim, it’s very much worse. Because after dying and being reborn into a world that’s built like a video game, Jim has found himself stuck in an antiquated new player zone for low level adventurers—stuck with a demon shrunk to the size of a plush animal, who only will help keep Jim alive so that it can kill him later and get back to its demon realm.

But in order to survive, Jim must level up. Except the zone he’s in fell out of use centuries ago and so this isn’t the typical “grind through the forest” part of the game anymore. On top of that, no one told the monsters that remain they were supposed to take it easy on the Noobs.
And even worse, the only new player around is Jim.

Yet Jim has been given an opportunity, and he’ll do his best to take advantage of it. Death caught him by surprise once.

He isn’t going to let it happen again.

Thoughts:

Jim has a hot date with Truck-kun (basically he gets hit by a truck and dies) and wakes up in a world where he has to choose a class and attempt to survive. Plopped down in a forest with no one but a ball of a demon for help he sets off.

I enjoyed this, a lot. But I’m very much a gamer who loves to read about games (I blame the strategy guides of the late 90s). So for me this was a ton of fun. We have frequent stat blocks where we see Jim’s numbers, levels, and skills and even the crafting in the world is not realistic. It fits more to game logic than anything and it was fun to read.

That I think is going to be the biggest hurdle for a lot of readers. If you’re okay with that frequent repetition than I highly recommend this. There is a reason this is a classic in the LitRPG space. I’m very excited for book two and look forward to seeing what these new folks in Noobtown get into!