Review: Negatives outweigh the positives
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 11, 2013
This has a really neat plot, and I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, the negatives outweighed the positives.I felt like I picked up the second book in the story. Escobar tosses you into this world from the start - and a lot of times that works. But the author never really fills in the world. People with magical abilities are running around - how does society deal with this? Do regular people know or just a select few? How has magic made this society different? So with some additional world-building, this would have really eased the flow of the novel for me. I could never get a feel for what this world was supposed to be like.The book is set during World War 2, in the late 1930s. This book could have been set at any period, because nothing places the story in a particular time period other than the constantly referenced war. Nothing about fashion, technology, etc. It could have been a WW2 that occurred in 1985.I had a hard time keeping all of the characters straight. Each character has a first and last night, and then a first and last fake name as well. I found it difficult to keep track of everyone because Escobar would switch from referring to a character by their real first name to suddenly refer to them by their fake last name, etc.