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My take on a self-published Christian Fantasy, The Angel's Covenant 2/26/2014 2:50:01 PM
An interesting, but not entirely successful book. I received a free copy of this book for an honest review. But reviewing this book was not so easy, because while there were a lot of good things in it, there were also several issues that took away from the enjoyment of reading it.
The Angel’s Covenant revolves around a group known as Watchers, whose mission is to watch over humanity, naturally. Their friends and allies are known as Keepers, who are similar, but have added powers that they can use to protect the Watchers. These Watchers and Keepers are in a battle against a fallen angel and his demonic minions who wish to pretty much take over the world for themselves.
The book’s strength is in the author’s story-telling ability. Ms. Landes can describe scenes of otherworldly beauty or gory violence equally well. Her prose is clear and straightforward, without any meandering or complex sentences which lose the reader halfway through. She paints strong visual pictures that allow the reader to feel he is right in the middle of the battles between the demons and the protectors of humanity. She is adept at pacing, and the book never drags or goes off on tangents.
Although the story, and the mythology behind the different groups, seems to be more supernatural than the Christian Fantasy the book is billed as, this wasn't a major concern, as long as the roles and the powers of each group is spelled out and internally consistent.
This brings me to one of the problems I had: We know very little about who, or what, these people, who are there to protect humanity, are. For example, I had no way of knowing what abilities the Watchers or Keepers had, so if in the middle of some crisis one of them suddenly created a wall of energy for protection, or turned cave-paintings into warriors, I wondered why they could do that. It felt like the author simply made up whatever powers she wanted whenever it was convenient for the characters to have them. When this happened there was little real tension, because there was no way of knowing how much danger any of them were in at any given time, since they always had hidden and unexplained talents which could get them out of trouble.
This problem could have been solved by spending more time on the training that the main character, Elina, undergoes over the years with her guardian angel, Malach. I imagine Ms. Landes might have been concerned that too much detail about this training would have slowed her story down (and it certainly is fast-paced). In this case, however, a deeper look at her powers and how she learned to handle them would make the abilities she and her friends display more “realistic” within the context of the story, and perhaps make the book that much more satisfying.
While the story was interesting, it was also a bit unclear. For example, why were certain people descendants of a long line of Watchers, while others seemed to be the only Watchers in their family? And what exactly do the Watchers do? (They haven’t exactly kept the world safe from the predations of evil, whether human or otherwise, for the past two millennia. Nor did their watching ability prepare them for the attack on their own village by the demons.) Were the demons spiritual beings, or physical? (They certainly died bloody deaths, their bodies often ripped apart. This made me think that a well-armed military division might have been able to handle them without too much trouble.) I also wasn't sure why the fallen angel would want to fight the Watchers. There were so few of them, and they were isolated on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, I thought he could do pretty much as he wanted with the rest of the human race and just avoid the Watchers totally, without having to confront them. It wasn't clear what they could have done had he decided to hurt any of the 7 billion other inhabitants of the world.
This was the kind of story that I enjoyed while I was reading it, but after putting the book down left me scratching my head. Perhaps in the sequels, some of these matters will be clarified, and perhaps some of my complaints won’t be of any concern to other readers. But these were some of the things that took away from my enjoyment of the book.
Finally, and briefly, a couple of other reviews mentioned that this book needs a good edit. I add my voice to theirs and hope that Ms. Landes does take the time to get her manuscript cleaned up, and doesn't go releasing the sequel before making sure that it, too, is ready for prime time.
