Review: Great story idea, just needs some more work
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 28, 2012
The Other Covenant Vow Of The Seven: Book One by Caroline Crosby is a novel about Elizabeth, a woman who has suppressed her precognitive abilities her entire life to hide from the black magic covenant until Richard Bennett, her grandfather's enemy, calls her out of the blue and asks her to protect his wife, Althea, because he knows he is about to die. Because of a promise Elizabeth made, she must take the assignment despite the rift between their families. Richard gives her a manuscript detailing historical truths about a black covenant he was involved with and how this covenant influenced history and changed the world for its benefit, the reason someone wants to murder him. Elizabeth has known about the black magic cult her whole life and has hid her powers from them, but never knew the extent of their influence until reading Richard's words. After Richard's death, Elizabeth vows to use her enforcer training to find the murderer and bring about a justice regular law enforcement could never achieve.The above sounds like an interesting book and the first chapter, when I read it, sounded promising so I decided to continue with the book and review it. After the first chapter the book fell short for me. The very next chapter is a section of the manuscript mentioned above and it's written in a telling style instead of in scenes and goes on forever and is like reading a history text book from high school. It feels like the author wanted to show off all the research they did on history instead of write a book that entertains. The whole book is too dry and matter of fact for me, not much character emotion or personality to draw the reader in, at least not for me. Some readers may enjoy all the historical research and information in this book, if that's your thing. There is just too much back story that is told to the reader instead of it being worked into the story. Lots and lots of back story.I can't comment on the mobi or epub formatting because I was given a PDF file to read, however, I did come across some typos through the piece, but not enough to be annoyed and stop reading. I would suggest the author take another look through it and clean it up, but overall for a self-published work, the author did an exceptional job of copyediting. There was some head hopping in this novel, not enough for me to stop reading, but enough for me to mention it. Any time you change POV you should put a break to warn the reader something is about to change otherwise your reader my get confused. It's best to stay in the same POV throughout a chapter, but if you do need to change, you should leave a break or put asterisks.Which brings us into characters. I thought all the characters had very rich histories to build personalities on, but the characters ended up not having much personality. Nothing really differentiated the characters except gender, name, and their descriptions. No quirks or mannerisms, nothing to make them interesting or stand out. No personal internal struggles from their past, nothing that I picked up on. Without any real emotional turmoil or struggle, I couldn't connect with any of the characters and if I can't connect with the characters, it's hard for me to stay interested in the book. I just don't care what happens to them.I also feel the novel could be shortened. The manuscript parts would be better shorter or rewritten as scenes leaving only the relevant info to the plot in and not all the info. The other sections of the novel could be shortened by getting rid of redundant information and cleaning out unneeded words to shorten sentences and word count to help the novel move faster. I'd like to see the magic part of the novel explained better as well, especially in the beginning where it is just thrown in and the reader is like, what? Where did that come from and how does it work, what does that mean?I had a problem with the ending as well. The novel ends in the middle of the climax and there is no resolution. That would be OK If it was ended on a cliff hanger, but it's not. The story just stops. It would be like ending The Matrix at the part where Neo blows up Agent Smith and not having the parts after where he wakes up, gets the girl, talks on the phone, and flies away like Superman resolving everything in the movie. I know this is the first book in this series, but there should have been some resolution ending the book and hinting what the next book would be about.This book doesn't have a lot of action in it so if you're into action then you won't like this book. If you are into history and twisting it into conspiracies and chatting and discovering those conspiracies, then you may love this book and should check it out.