Review: A great plot that could be more developed, consistent and reader-friendly
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 19, 2013
This book has a creative theme, great setting, interesting characters, but didn't work very well for me. It kept my attention till the ouija session, but afterwards it lost a bit of its focus, the narrative becoming confused in some points, slow and a little repetitive (shadows, shadows, shadows).As the other reviewers said, the plot revolves around Mayan and Biblical mythology interspersed with each other, has some interesting philosofical points, a fantastic binding between the plot and a music and overall is a good story. I would rank these factors with 3.5 stars.The writing and descriptive style isn't this good. First-person point of view is used, but alternates among some characters and the reader (at least, myself) can easily lost himself, trying to guess who is describing the scene. Sometimes it is automatic, but when you have 4 characters together and the point of view is alternating among them, it can be a very difficult task to know who is the voice of the story. In other moments, objects suddenly appears of nowhere in the middle of scenes. At first, I thought it could be my fault, but after re-reading the previous paragraphs without finding any reference to them, I perceived that they simply were not described beforehand - you have to accept that the object is now there. 2.5 stars here: not good nor bad, just sufficient.Also, some of the scenes are badly depicted, mostly resorting to saying that shadows are moving everywhere. Sometimes, the characters are in a place and suddenly, in the next chapter, the reader has to guess who and/or where the POV character is (besides among shadows). The Mayan mythology is unleashed furiously without explanation at first, a lot of unknown and exotic names to which the reader (at least, myself) has no connection and has to tentatively get some sense of all that names and attributes in a so short span of pages. Later on, some of these are explained, but to a layman, a lot was left out. 2 stars.The characters are intriguing and interesting in their own, albeit sometimes their reactions could be questionable. But Cadee and Nemun are the main force behind the story for me, the two others (Usha and Ju) just not so important. There is a mood of mystery around the three men that in the end were not fully explained, so to me it was a little failing in the storytelling, provoking the reader's curiosity without delivering the full package. 3 stars.A fair warning: I am usually a book devourer, reading easily a book a day if I have the time. I took almost four weeks to read this little one, because it did not entice me sufficiently. So, some of the points I made above could be excessiveness from my part, so take my review with a grain of salt.