I found it extremely charming. I think the banter largely worked for me. I loved how the so-called bad guy who runs the brothel turns out to actually be from our world and not actually running a brothel at all -- it made me think of, ugh, someone from early Song of Ice and Fire books that I read long before the tv show and the author got the chance to annoy me? :) Anyway, I was totally thrown to discover that Key BECAME the emperor, though in retrospect she lined it all up beautifully. My big question is: when Rae changes things in the world of the book, what changes in the print copies we have in "our" world? Is her sister now reading a different series? Can she actually change what's on the page? And what does it mean to say that these characters have real life aside from however their author wrote them?