Review: Great book about angels
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 26, 2013
Firstly, I got this book for free on Smashwords.Secondly, I actually read Angel of Death: A Love Story, which is a sequel of sorts, before reading this book, so I came knowing a bit about the characters beforehand and that might have affected my judgement of the story.Okay, now that we've got all that sorted out, let's get on with the review.Erishkigal demonstrated in Angel of Death that she is a master in weaving excellent characters and The Chosen One certainly did not disappoint even though it was written before Angel of Death. The characters are fun and interesting, including the minor ones. There's such diversities in Erishkigal's characters that I just can't help but fall in love with everyone of them. If anything, Erishkigal has amazing talents in penning the emotions of each character and bring each one of them to life. Given how many characters she was juggling, I was actually amazed that by the end of the book, I actually felt as if I've know all of them the whole of my life. Throughout the book, it' really not hard to rejoice with the characters when they are happy, to feel sorry for them when they are vulnerable and to be angry on their behalf when they get mistreated by someone - only that you can't get angry at said someone because you're too busy empathizing with them. It's amazing how she managed to present a villain who is all out against the hero, yet make the reader feel sorry for the villain while still rooting for the hero. Once again, I would definitely give 5 stars to her characters. If there is one character that didn't quite work for me, it would be Ninsiana because she's very close to being called Mary-Sue.The plot is interesting enough and the universe that Erishkigal had woven together was rather fun. Think Star Wars in terms of God and Satan. What happens if Shay'tan (Satan) wasn't really the bad guy but Hashem's (god) partner in their game of intergalactic chess? What happens if we are nothing but a hobby? What happens if there's really a greater evil out there and their real mission is to keep that evil at bay? Sword of the Gods is what you will get. If I complained that the world development in Angel of Death was bad, The Chosen One more than made up for it. The Alliance's Parliament, the hybrid army that Hashem deploys to fend of Shay'tan's Sata'anic lizards, the spacecrafts... It was pretty interesting.My complaint would be that the technology doesn't seem to add up. On one end, they have hyperdrives that allow their spaceships to travel at the speed of light and technology to produce remolecularised food yet on the other hand, they are still dealing with lame old 2D television screen and pretty much the same Parliament that we have today. It's like stepping into a world that hasn't quite made up its mind whether it's advanced or backwards. It's also pretty unsettling when the timeline gets all mixed up. In the book, earth is still somewhere in the pre-Mesopotamian time. Or 'stone age', as the book puts it. Humans are naturally polygamous so it comes across as culturally inaccurate when all of the characters on earth are monogamous. Also, humans only discovered about the heart and how it pumps blood in the sixteenth century so it's unnerving that a stone age healer would know about 'the thick line that carries blood into the heart' (think William Harvey). Moreover, I didn't quite like how orderly everything was, like how one species is nicely stepping up to take over one of the declining hybrid species. Given how diverse the populations in the galaxy was, you would think that there will be a huge mumbo-jumbo amongst the non-hybrid military. It makes me wonder why the Spiderids, Mantoids and Delphiniums aren't complaining about being the only non-hybrid species being forced to serve the military. On top of that, I felt like the book could use a little better editing. However, I would say that overall there's nothing so bad that it screams in your face all the time, so it's still an enjoyable read.The same review appears on my LibraryThing and Goodreads profile.