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smawj's review against another edition
5.0
A really really good fantasy tale. Does suffer a little bit from some tropes standard to fantasy, the chosen one has to travel back to his home with several companions who may or may not be evil. The characters are great, the writing flows like water and I desperately want to read the rest in the series.
branch_c's review against another edition
2.0
While the setting is interesting and the premise innovative, I didn't enjoy this book as much as I'd hoped to. The supernatural elements are creative, but leaned too often and too far toward the horrific for my taste. Perhaps by design for comparison with the upstanding Daniel, most of the other characters were unpleasant. Too much death and misery, and whenever the characters weren't killing or torturing, they were obnoxiously insulting each other.
The writing was often evocative, but at times the attempts went too far and came across as clumsy; for example: "buttresses bent at vulgar angles" and "corners met at unnecessary angles" in the space of a couple of pages. Beyond that, the dialogue and narrative came across as a bit wooden and perfunctory, and the ending veered off into bizarre surrealism.
I hesitate to criticize too harshly, since I understand the effort it takes to research, plot and write a story like this, but I have to be honest, this was simply not an enjoyable read.
The writing was often evocative, but at times the attempts went too far and came across as clumsy; for example: "buttresses bent at vulgar angles" and "corners met at unnecessary angles" in the space of a couple of pages. Beyond that, the dialogue and narrative came across as a bit wooden and perfunctory, and the ending veered off into bizarre surrealism.
I hesitate to criticize too harshly, since I understand the effort it takes to research, plot and write a story like this, but I have to be honest, this was simply not an enjoyable read.
detailsandtales's review against another edition
If I could, I'd give this a 2.5. Because of this, I'm going to refrain from rating it, because there's a big difference between a 2 and a 3. I'm happy that someone is writing fantasy based on Jewish mythology, and I support the existence of this book and more like it, but, in the end, I didn't enjoy most of this one. I think the biggest issue that I had with this book is in the protagonist. Daniel is supposed to be one of the Lamed Vav, one of the 36 righteous people that hold up the world. In my mind, the Lamed Vav are people without the character flaws that most people have, and it's really hard to write a protagonist who doesn't have flaws. To me, Daniel feels too human, and he also ends up seeming weak for much of the book, carried along by the plot instead of directing it. The story does improve at the end, and the climax is, for the most part, full of energy and beautifully written, but if I wasn't personally acquainted with the author, I most likely would have abandoned this book long before the climax.
farahmendlesohn's review against another edition
3.0
The material is good but in the end the actual writing couldn’t support the story. Places that should have been tense weren’t, people we needed to care about were ciphers, and it ended with a version of ‘but it was all a dream’.
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