The Good Student

I'm just glad this isn't another shitty harem fiction. Honestly, I find that the idea refreshing, and takes on a different route than the usual overpowered characters here in RR.

You don't need a good fighting scene to make the story interesting. Something as simple as a conversation, from witty to banter to exasperating conversations can be as enjoyable, and more so, than any fighting scene.

I loved the dragon book scene.

MC of this story is pretty similar to the one in another work by the same author, minus the cynicism. If you are familiar with the author and don't like his other pieces, don't let it dissuade you from reading this one. This is a planned story and it shows in both the pacing and the quality. Here are some reasons why you should give this story a shot.

1. Beautfiful Prose. It's difficult to describe in a short paragraph just how good the writing is in this story, easily on par with major published works. The author is obviously well practiced in the tools of his trade.

2. Stellar world building. You won't find any info dump chapters in this story. Lore and information about the setting are revealed gradually and meshed naturally with the plot. 

3. Consistent characters with relateable motivations in a believable universe. Secretly OP broody MC that reveals his powers to put the beatdown on TOTAL JERKS (TM) while chicks fall all over him? None of that here. Another cheap plot hook I see in these types of stories is authors having the story *** on their characters for the sake of cheap drama. Orphan who had his entire village slaughtered by evil overlord? *yawn*. This story completely avoids this trope. MC has a fairly stable home life, the lords of the land aren't raging assholes (any more than you'd expect), and society allows for some merit based upward mobility in a pseudo-feudal system.

4. Natural and well paced progression. What do I mean by this? One of the major hooks in this story is the "magic" system. So far the reader only has enough information to make inferences, but it seems like it building up to be something science based. While birth is one way to access it, the "mages" in this story seem to be selected by academic ability. Our MC isn't slinging fireballs straight out of the prologue and there is every indication that he will have to earn his way through the plot. No mysterious old man with cheat training, no heavenly fruits, no genetic lottery, no xian xia bullshit(cultivation is a plague on fiction. BATTLE GOD ULTIMATE DRAGON JOHN CENA), just a normal base human with brains and a good work ethic.

5. Well excectuted ?sort-of-romance? I cannot begin to describe how tired I am of cringy, self-aggrandizing MC/pseudo SI's who think they are god's gift to women spouting their juvenile insecurities and obviously incomplete understanding of basic human nature. Just when I was about to abandon all hope and fling my keyboard through the window, Mooderino arrived to save the day with his beautiful story. Again, I will fall back to point #3, every interaction in this story is, above all else, BELIEVABLE and CONSISTENT with the characters and backgrounds.

I can go on and on about how great the execution of this story is and how many greating writing techniques the author is using, but I'll stop here. If you are looking for curbstomp MC's with the depth of a puddle on a sunny day plowing his way through a cardboard setting, then there are hundreds of other "works" on this site. If you want excellent prose, beautiful world building, and well developed characters, you won't regret reading this story. 

edit: my saltiness at some of the stuff I have been reading has reached critical levels and erupted all over this review. That aside, read this story, seriously. This is the gem that makes trawling through all the garbage worth it.

Original, consistent, well written and well edited. Sophisticated and coherent world building. Moves at a steady pace, giving you time to enjoy the carefully crafted mood and atmosphere.  The characters have depth and complexity, and they push the story forwards, as is the case in any good book, not just rushing through a sequence of "and thens...". They are capable of surprising us but without undermining our sense of who they are. On the contrary, each action builds the characters out further and helps us get to know them better. As Heraclitus said, character is destiny! Look forward to reading more.

I CAN ONLY SAY THAT I'M IMPRESSED I JUST DISCOVERED THESE NOVEL TODAY AND I READ IT ALL SO THAKS FOR THESE AMAIZING STORY KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK BUT IF IT COULD BE POSSIBOL I WOULD LIKE MORE RELESES

The amount of works of this altitude could be counted on fingers of one hand on this site. The reason is, it exceeds long established standards. If I were to estimate its worth correctly, I would need either to remoove all my previous reviews, or introduce a six star scale. What mooderino is trying to do here is akin eating an elephant. It's both tedious and rewarding work, that has no end to it. Writing becomes like that when you start aproaching the plane of professional writers, the likes of which do not stay on royal road for long, hence "fingers of one arm" phrase. I do beleave that moderino has outgrown this sandbox recently and I wish him bright future.

P.S. I wonder if an image of Nic was influenced by Patric Rothfus's Kvothe in any way? Those two have something in common.

I am two chapters in and am unfortunately hooked on a once a week upload speed. The MC is a bit of a mystery, but it is great to see that he isn't just jumping into cultivation or some garbadge. Tons of attention to detail too. Here's to hoping for 2 releases a week!

The Good Student is a really well-written story, with an interesting premise and characters, and a great first 500 pages, but the plot pacing really slows and gets scattered.

The premise of the story is that a working-class boy gets accepted to the most prestigious school in the nation by virtue of being an excellent student and highly intelligent. The early plot basically follows his attempts to succeed in school as well as his attempts to rekindle his friendship with his noble-born childhood friend. 

The writing style and characters are the greatest strengths of this story. The story is really well-written, with some of the best prose and flow on RR, and this writing style really enhances the story and adds depth to the setting and character interactions. The characters are also well done, being complex people subtly shown to have further depth in their secrets and backgrounds. 

The early plot of the story is great. It moves at a good pace, is interesting, and enjoyable to follow, and continues this way for most of the first book. Towards the end of the first book, events lead to a long arc that is glacially paced and quite repetitive, while still well-written.

After that, the plot kind of loses focus, and seems to become somewhat scattered. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that the magic system is not well-developed, and is frankly quite a boring one. 

At this point, I somewhat lost interest in the story, and the philosophical slant it took really wasn't for me.

Overall, while I don't think I'd recommend this story, I can definitely say that it has some great writing.

There is nothing to not love about this novel if its three tags, "Adventure, Drama, and Fantasy" each appeal to you.

Each character is unique, and even the eccentricities feel well-earned and gracefully displayed. The story moves at such a stunning pace that you could easily pick the story up and find yourself wrapped deeply in the web of the plot before you even know what it is.

The chapters that some web-novels might use as interludes are so closely entwined with the main story, and so well written, that oftentimes they're as, or more interesting than the main plot, and that main plot is fueled by carefully layered mystery, rather than an aggressively overwhelming threat and hasty retaliation.

If you're wondering if you should read this story, stop here and do so. The remainder of this review is simply to discuss the point that The Good Student is so well-written, it might not even belong on RRL at all.

~~

The Good Student is a fantastically well-written novel- so much so that I am almost sad to see it on Royal Road. It is not a web-novel, and understanding the difference between a novel and a web-novel is as simple as reading it.

RRL is chock-full of well-told stories, enjoyable characters, and immersive plots, but The Good Student still stands out above any of those for a simple reason: There is no chapter of this story that you could remove without causing significant damage to the story. Every event feels like the next node on the web of the plot, and nothing is wasted.

Compare that to a story like The Wandering Inn, which is constantly entertaining and extremely quality-rich, but could probably be cut in half without losing much of the core story.

And this is why I'm surprised to see The Good Student as a web-novel at all. It is too carefully written, and too successful with that care, to not have been offered to a literary agent first. 

Moody, you're extremely generous for sharing this novel with us all for free. We don't deserve you or your hard work.

A good student. Five chapters in and I'm already hooked. The author's other stories are really good and I recommend you try them if you're fine with a story SANS OP. But this one I'm afraid is something I beg you to try. As long as you can get past the LACK of ooh's and wow's magic and action, I believe you will find it a good snack you won't regret trying. This story gave me what I missed in stories since a long time, the feeling I used to get before sci-fi,fantasy or lit-rpg were a-thing(I love these genres mind you) thank you mooderino. (P.S. I might have become a little emo and inflated this story a little too much(?) But its my honest feelings and I want to see this story reach the top.

Very interesting but grows a bit disapointing as you read more. Starting from chapter 1, you'd expect to see the novel to be about romance, which, I end up did looking forward to, but instead was much very different. At the same time, the developement and progress between the two love interest developes at a very slow paste. Binge reading for certain readers such as myself would oftenlly cause them to skim through many/some of the reading as the progression is also very slow. At the same time, wanting to know what happens next is prove that the story is great, but, it just was never enough to satisfies the thirst for I and possibly some readers.

 Dropped at chapter 47