Was not able to get through the book so didn't feel I could review it on my blog.

I received this as a free ebook from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Tl;dr summary: This self-published book is pretty good, all things considered, and overall I'd put it at 2.5 stars which I am rounding up to three.

This one is kind of hard for me to place. I guess I'll mention first that it appears to be self-published, so with that in mind I generally have different expectations from a commercially-produced book. I feel that it's important to approach any book as an informed consumer, and I think different standards are appropriate for a self-published work than one might use for a mass-produced commercial paperback. There are some grammar errors, for example, which I consider to be more or less par for the course. They didn't bother me much and there were MANY fewer of them than there are in some other self-published ebooks. The manuscript has clearly at least been proofread, which is nice, and I didn't notice any glaring continuity errors or gaping plot holes.

The story itself is pretty engaging, an adventure involving the Annunaki and various ancient deities, who turn out to be real, and a war for the future of humanity. It also sets up nicely for the sequel at the end. That said -- and again, this is not necessarily unusual in a self-published novel -- it feels a little disjointed at times and is just not as polished as I would hope for in a finished book. This isn't a writing workshop, so I'll skip most of my comments about how I think the craft of the writing could be improved, but it is relevant in a review to point out that this is not a polished, professionally published novel and unfortunately in some places it shows.

There are characters that appear for one or two scenes and then disappear, and other characters that seem to be important at one point in the story are later discarded and never mentioned again. Some of the action scenes are incredibly brief and feel tacked on, or as if the author has a really exciting picture in his head of what is happening in the story, but that vision fails to come through on the page. In addition, the writing tends to indulge in philosophical meandering from time to time. I like philosophy as much as the next guy, but it feels a little bit like the author struggles to show what his characters feel and believe through their actions, so instead he offers a long dialogue or lets us see his characters' thoughts, and sometimes it feels a bit clumsy or as if the reader is being beaten over the head with these ideas. Finally, the story in general feels like it lacks something. Depth, perhaps, or a sense of urgency to the conflict. There is a greater feeling of urgency later in the book, and the stakes begin to feel real for the protagonist, but then the main conflict is resolved over the space of a few pages in a way that felt quite anticlimactic to me, and readers are asked to focus on the new, bigger conflict ahead that is coming in the sequel. This wouldn't be a problem, but the story in this first volume goes by so quickly and I felt as though I never really got to know any of the characters as more than just broad sketches. Even the protagonist changes motivation and personality more than once over the course of the story, and it was sometimes hard to feel invested in what happens to him.

That said, the story itself is fairly compelling and I was never tempted to put the book aside and not finish it. I kept wanting to find out what happened next, even if the answer wasn't always everything I could have hoped. This is a solid first effort for a novel, and with some editing and reworking I feel like it has a lot of potential. I would probably read the sequel, if only to find out what happens next and to watch the author's writing craft improve.