Children of Wisdom trilogy (Stephanie Erickson)

The Children of Wisdom Trilogy - Stephanie Erickson

Well that's about four hours of my life I won't get back, but since it was four hours spent on a plane, they were counted as lost anyway. This 3-chaptered novel (because that's what it is - the cliffhangers at the ends of parts 1 & 2 are even more egregious than is usual in a fantasy series) is set within a cosmology that includes elements of Greek mythology (notably the 3 Fates) merged with a version of Christianity, heavily filtered through American pop culture. God is a remote bureaucrat along the lines of "Heaven Can Wait" (or "Here Comes Mr. Jordan"), whence we also get the plot point of the too-early death. This God runs what appears to be a sort of human-processing shop, in an area of the heavens behind a third gate between those of Heaven and Hell. Purgatory, which we would expect to be that third gate, is disused (to say it's "in limbo" would just confuse everybody... ) and instead rather illogically housed within Hell, chiefly for the narrative convenience of allowing the principal characters to have Hellish adventures on their way to and from the Halloween castle shackled dungeon.

I don't mind cosmological fantasy, but this one is really not all that well thought through, and that makes the final trial and fate of the ultimate (human) villain a bit risible to me, I'm afraid. You will not convince this atheist that complete extinction, which is what she is doomed to, is worse than an infinity of the tortures of Hell, which would presumably be her "normal" fate. This is all the more uncomfortable when juxtaposed against her actual sin, which is going to extremes to preserve life in a suffering child who should be humanely allowed to die.

This was (I believe) a free Kindle offering, and I sometimes wonder with these things whether I should, instead of criticism, apply the much more generous standards of fan-fiction non-criticism, since it's essentially "gift literature."  But I do wish this author's kind, non-critical editors had explained to her that "opaque" does not mean "transparent". Worse, the error appears in both the first and the final book, so it was allowed to slide even after the first part was published.

Two stars as opposed to one, merely because, although the control of tone was iffy, the spelling and grammar were generally correct, and despite the occasional howler like "opaque", the only major objection I had to the diction was careless repetition of the same descriptive word within the same passage without any rhetorical justification.

You get what you pay for.