Review: The rebellion against the Gods continues...
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 10, 2011
The second book in the DoS series opens just before the ending of the first book, Day of Sacrifice: The Prophecy. When the first book ended with a cliffhanger, I had questions that needed answers. Where the heck did they all come from? How did they know to do that? Where did they go? And also, what happens to Julian? Well, the book continues with the storyline so we do get to see what happens immediately after the cliffhanger ending in the first book and questions get answered. This installment revolves around Cara (mother of Aiden) and Abel, another Guardian. Flora and Julian from the first book still play a part in this book so I did get a sense of their continuing story, but I was hoping their relationship would get more attention.The rebellion against the Gods continues. A small group of Guardians and Sacrifices have banded together to fight the Gods, fulfill the prophecy, and stop the Sacrifices. They have regrouped at Julian's homestead in the Outer Territory. Abel has been assigned to protect Cara whose son was recently sacrificed to the Gods. She is a strong witch who can control the air and also a healer. I didn't really get a feel for Abel's back story. I wanted to know more about him.Their feelings for each other grow as the story progresses, but I don't feel there was any resolution to that relationship by the end of the book so I will be interested to see if it will continue in some way as a part of the future stories. This world is not just made up of witches and angels -- there is also a vampire and a werewolf in this one but the vampire is the more prominent secondary character. I wonder if we will see him in the future as there seemed to be a hint of a relationship.The books so far are short at around 16K words, which is novelette size (somewhere between a short story and a novella), so there isn't a lot of room to really delve into the characters and flesh them out. I would have liked more character development, but at the same time I didn't really feel cheated. The author does a good job of presenting characters the reader can care about given the short amount of space to work within each book.If you have seen my other reviews for Stacey's books then you know I already enjoy her writing style. It is tight and engaging without a lot of superfluous scenes that don't add anything to the story. There was one brief scene though that seemed to defy the laws of gravity. I read this scene several times and it still doesn't make sense to me. This is the scene where Abel scoops Cara up in his "arms" then a moments later (while still holding her) he moves Cara's hand from his chest to around his neck. Um, did he grow a third arm? If he let go of Cara to do this, wouldn't her legs drop to the floor? I haz confusion...or I'm missing something. (ETA: this scene has since been revised.)The books in this series are short but I think of them more like a TV series where the story continues with each episode and you have to stay tuned to the same bat-time and same bat-channel to find out what happens next. Speaking of which, the next book in this series is titled Dormant: Forever United and is expected to be out sometime around March or April 2011.If you liked the first book in this series then I think you will enjoy this book. Due to the continuing nature of the story in this series and because the short length doesn't allow for much of any back story, I recommend reading them in order or you will probably be at a loss as to what is going on.