The Blood of a God: The Nephilim Chronicles, Book One by Lance BurtonMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
"The year is 2047 and the fate of the Earth hangs in the balance. Commander Tarakia Sol, a warrior-princess with the blood of a celestial coursing through her, leads a special team called Talon Squad in a fight to save humanity from a coming invasion by a race of beings in the Orion Constellation . . . beings who are the descendants of a former Angel and will stop at nothing to enslave all of humanity. Will all her power, training, and faith be enough to stop them? What does the revelation of their existence mean in relation to our place in the universe? The answers are within . . ."
I like to give other self-published authors a chance because I'm in the same boat as them: putting together a manuscript, doing your own editing and illustrating, and trying to market the book. I know it means a lot to an author for others to read their work, and so I gave this book a fair chance, and my review below is my honest opinion about it.
While Blood of a God definitely needs a lot of work, I appreciated the author's viewpoint on things and some of the creative concepts he came up with.
Pros: I liked the idea of an alien race that originated from earth but got their genes mixed up with fallen angels. I also liked that this was a pretty clean book in terms of violence and language, and it had absolutely no sex. Very unusual for a science-fiction novel nowadays.
Cons: The cons of this book outweighed the pros quite a bit, and that's why I've given it such a low rating. My biggest beef is that the author tends to explain the history of just about anything he mentions in this book, such as military tactics and martial arts, to name a few, that are irrelevant to the scene. For example, in one of the chapters, the characters General Ka-Tel and Tarakia are in a sparring session with other soldiers, and after she mentions that Ka-Tel specializes in mixed martial-arts, the author goes on to explain for 3-4 paragraphs, I think, about the history of MMA. Like I said, it's irrelevant to the scene and disrupts the action.
This happens throughout the book, and I skimmed over these paragraphs to get back into the action of the scene. There are appropriate times in a manuscript to explain the history or back-story to something, but not in the middle of a fight or otherwise intense action scene. The author also spent a lot of time telling what was happening rather than showing it. It would have helped to show unfamiliar things in context, rather than explain them in rambling paragraphs. I'm glad I didn't read all the exposition chunks; I would have been seriously annoyed and probably wouldn't have finished the book. I got the feeling that the author was showing off his knowledge of certain things, and I as a reader simply didn't care about what he knew; I only cared about what the characters were going through.
Speaking of characters, I could not relate to any of them. The main protagonist, Tarakia, acts as a mouth-piece for the author when it comes to religious and political views, and has many characteristics of a Mary-Sue: super-awesome powers, praised by other characters for how awesome she is, and Dues ex Machina right near the end of the book, right when it was getting really interesting and I hoped the Talon Squad would be able to get themselves out of a sticky situation.
The other characters have next to no personalities; any opportunity for development is lost between the action and the info-dumping. I think the only real personalities we got in the book were from Aura and Mark, but they were stereotypical funny friend and serious friend, respectively, and didn't have anything else substantial to round them out.
Most of the villains were evil simply for the sake of being evil. Kane seemed to have the most realistic motivation –– restoring his honor –– but it was still a shallow excuse in carrying out all the evil schemes of his master, Kadan.
The author likes to explain abbreviated terms and even some terms that I was already familiar with. A latter example would be that he mentions the starboard side of a spaceship, and puts in parentheses the “right side.” I already knew what starboard was. I'm not sure if he really knew who his audience was when he wrote this book: incompetent readers or young children?
Perhaps one of the most fatal flaws of this book was the fact that the author inserted himself as Tarakia's father, Lance Burton, and that Tarakia is actually named Jade Burton, which is the author's actual daughter's name. That's a surefire Mary/Gary Sue alert, and it just made the story feel silly.
One more strange thing about the writing is that all the punctuation for dialogue is outside the quotations, i.e.:
'Yeah, Dad, I see them...stars'!
'Yes, Dad...when can we go'?
It's like this through the entire manuscript. I got used to it after awhile, but this definitely needs to be fixed.
I think this book has potential due to some interesting concepts, but it needs serious revision and editing. On a few more random notes, I think the book title "Angel Blood" would be more appropriate for this book, as Tarakia doesn't really have "god blood," and she's not a princess as the synopsis would have you believe.
2/5 Stars.
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