I was asked to help defend a review of a book on Amazon.com. It was kind of a fun little jaunt. In fact, I could really get into this whole book reviewing thing. Maybe next time I might even try.
I can’t help but agree with this review. Having read the thing, it’s an editors nightmare? Did they even run this by an editor or did they just dash the first draft off to some print on demand service? No legitimate publisher would have let this book out the door in this state, if they even picked it up at all. Sure, “in the beginning” is a nice place to start. It’s a little cliche, but one can deal.
However, how many times are they going to be allowed to just simply repeat the same thing over and over again? Not to be nitpicky, but the whole length of the thing is excessive and that doesn’t help. A simply, “in the beginning God created everything,” could have taken care of the whole first part of the book and gotten on with the story. I know you were trying to do the ultimate in meta-world building there, but you could have started somewhere in the middle and revealed that as part of the plot.
Characterization needs work as well. God is, by far, the least interesting character in the entire book. There’s really no development of his character. Sure, we get a sudden switch half-way through, but that made no sense at all. His motivations are really poor at times. And he seems really self-obsessed. We really don’t need Him at all. The other characters, who have far more interesting tales, could have simply gotten on without him. Take Moses, we could have done an entire fantasy trilogy on his fight against Egyptian oppression and the fight to recover the Jewish homelands. Instead God snaps his fingers and they’re off. Then we get to Israel and it’s the same thing all over again.
Then we get to the New Testament which tries to pull that multiple points of view to a single event thing that people try every once in awhile. But, this book fails miserable. They can’t even agree on major facts. That and they seem to throw in the early bits of the Jesus character for no reason. One prologue could have handled that just fine.
And the ending, if you can call it that, is completely unsatisfactory and unnecessary. The story could have been ended right after the Jesus bit. As like most sequels, the second one just wasn’t as good. Just trying to cash in on the money making. Instead of making it a sequel though, they just stuck some half-finished idea on the end and wiped their hands of the whole deal. Sloppy, just sloppy.
This review is right, don’t buy this book. The authors don’t have a clue about writing. Even ‘Eragon’ was better written than this tripe. Do yourself a favor, if you really want to read good from creation to end of the world literature, pick up Tolkien.
