Review: The magical story continues . . .
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 6, 2013
I really enjoyed Eye of the Storm, and now Barok's Exodus is the second installment of William L. K.'s fantastical story of the planet with the purple haze surrounding it( get the reference to Jimmy Hendrix?) and the mushroom people(Acidel) which is a play on the acid that mushrooms produce along with 'el' which means some sort of god.  Reading this series is so much fun.  It's like entering a strange new world that's a play on our world.There are so many layers to dig through yet you can enjoy it on the surface layer as just a story of good vs evil with some dimensional lives ala Jane Roberts, or you can try to figure out how the brilliant author tied in everything from drugs to violin music.  Yes, I finally figured out why one of the main characters was named Barok, and it's because we are told that Becki, in her earth life, played violin.Speaking of the surface level, here's a bit of the plot.  At the end of book one, all hell breaks loose by way of a huge planet-wide storm that brings all the human craziness to a head.  People kill each other because they've gone crazy over the Acidel sweat.  Or they're just crazy with power and the sweat is a good excuse to start killing each other.We return to Stritonoly 6 years later and princess Becki has gone nutty and is under house arrest.  She has more personalities than even she can handle, and not many of them are up to any good.The star of this installment is Barok, the innocent mushroom-man who gets tired of being a slave and takes off.  He has quite an adventure and we are introduced to some new and very nasty beings who can read minds.Will Barok be able to make it home to save his people, and his bride?  We're also introduced a Mesjasz(Messiah?), a man written about in the Imperial Scriptures(the Bible of the planet) and it's said that everything will be destroyed once this guy reveals himself.  Good times.I really enjoyed this series.  It was a page-turner with fascinating characters combined with a puzzle that had me checking out the name of every character I ran into.  You really have to pay attention to every little thing in this book in order to appreciate the genius of the author.  I truly do not know how he put it all together, combining so many different types of ideas and into a compelling story.  L. K. must be the most knowledgeable man on the planet.  Maybe he's really a team of writers, that's my theory so far.William L. K. approached me for a review of his books and I'm glad I took all three of them in the series, though they do seem short, and might be better as one book in three parts.  His writing is so original that it was a joy to read.