Greetings and welcome to writing.com!
I guess I'll start by saying I've never read anything like this before, unless you count Paradise Lost... which may only be because I've not read the right books, but I felt it was original. It's well-written and has a nice balance of dialogue and description. Here are my thoughts and a few suggestions.
I felt a little lost. Not completely lost, not lost enough to demand that you fix it, but confused enough to mention it in my review. I think I will have to say it was because of all the curve balls. I love the curve balls, but the Holy Mother and the She-God and the Greek and everything didn't really have my mind in the story. I was trying to piece together your theology; I was trying to understand what kind of beings everybody and everything was; I was trying to find some sort of foothold within the story, a perspective from which to approach the book. I can pinpoint the exact moment I found that perspective—when Jasia says, “You will go to the Material Plane as a Fallen, but you will live among the humans as a human.” Why? Because it's a connection to things I know, it grounds everything else in the human earth. And I think it is ultimately the human that makes literature work. Do with that analysis what you will.
Okay, some concrete suggestions now.
I felt the third paragraph needs the most surgery: Christ is eternal, but your grammar needs to maintain one tense; the first sentence of this paragraph is past; the next is present; then past again. What kind of phases of Christ are we talking about? The “just a phase” kind of phase, or a phase within his life, or his eternal phase as before human, human, then glorified human, or what? Also in this paragraph you have “life itself,” and then, “Christ himself.” Maybe I'm missing the rhetorical significance of the repetition, but I couldn't see how they correspond.
… words of a foreign tongue to you they may be but they are the key to those who wish to change the fate of the world. This sentence is a little awkward... it trips over itself. Suddenly addressing your audience makes the whole sentence much more complicated, because you draw the reader into the drama, make it real-time. Secondly, it's like Yoda talking: “words to you they may be.” Don't abuse your verbs so. You could rearrange it like this: “To you these words may be mere nonsense, baby-talk, but to...”
She drew from nowhere a sword... This is a little vague. Why is she drawing the sword from nowhere? Do you mean that it appeared suddenly and nobody seemed to realize it was there? Or did she really draw it out of thin air, and if so, why not say as much?
Finally, don't make the exclamation points do your work for you, because they can't. Rather than putting one, two, and eventually three exclamation points as God thunders in heaven, just make her thunder. The “mighty thunder clap” is a step in the right direction... emphasize her rage by having her storm up and down, black clouds billow, the ground shake, her face turn red... really, exclamation points are just not as exciting.
Great work and keep writing!
-Mazel |
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