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sadieros73's review against another edition
1.0
The abstraction of all religions in this book interests me, but the main character is a little too weird. I kept waiting for him to become more interesting as the story developed but his details just became more miserable and unbelievable. I definitely wasn't expecting his trauma to be a homosexual assault. That's pretty much where the book derailed most of the stars from my review.
carolynf's review against another edition
4.0
If you are a religious conservative, you will hate this book. I am a Progressive Christian and I loved it, and immediately requested the sequel from inter-library loan. The world in this book is the battlefield of a war between the forces of religion/magic and science/reason. Yes, that's right - the witches and the priests are ON THE SAME SIDE. The why of this is nuts and a bit of a spoiler so I won't go into it here, but it is definitely a novel concept. The protagonist is Richard, who is in his late 20s, gorgeous, bisexual, and a cop. Bisexual cop is definitely something that I have not run across before in the fantasy genre, and it is a welcome change. He is unwillingly drafted into this war on the side of science/reason, even though he is pretty religious himself and has to unlearn a lot of that. One of his allies is Cross, who the book cover describes as a homeless Jesus, but that is really not the case at all. Cross is a supernatural being who is a compilation of various ideas of Jesus, Allah, and Jehovah created by a variety of different religious sects. But he is not The Jesus. Glad I could clear that up for you. There is also Rhiana, who is a university student in her early 20s majoring in Physics who has magical powers. So even though the war is against religion and magic, there are some religious people and magic users on the side of science/reason. My point is that these characters are not stereotypes. They are all complex with interesting backstories and compelling motivations.
jeregenest's review against another edition
1.0
The characters were very uncompelling and the fantasy aspects were just dull and derivitive. And the ending was just a setp up for a series.
theartolater's review against another edition
4.0
An…odd book. First of a series (I think?) about apocolyptic forces where Jesus is actually working on the side of Lucifer to eradicate the supernatural, and magic is bad as is religion and yeah. Odd, odd read, but strangely compelling at the same time. I don’t know who I could recommend this to, but hey.
cupiscent's review against another edition
Setting aside at page 95 because I'm not really enjoying anything it's doing. The reason vs religion central struggle seems to be getting both more and less nuanced: all religion is not bad, but there's a strong vibe of all bad is religious, or at least ignorant, that just... I think it's a cop-out. If you're going to pivot your worldbuilding and story around a fundamental struggle of/for humanity, and then sort of blame the depths of humanity's nastiness on Old Ones / aliens / evil emotion-eating creatures from a parallel dimension, I'm going to go off looking for something more interesting and intelligent. That's just how it is, unfortunately.
I might have stayed for delightful prose or gripping characters, but the former was far more workmanlike (not a flaw if the story it's carrying is enthralling me) and the latter weren't doing anything for me, especially our poor little pretty rich boy hero. His sexuality has been interestingly and subtly flagged, but he's just got so much privilege that I can't say I'm particularly interested in his various crises; I did think that his faith was going to be an interesting element, but it seems to have been flimsier than anticipated.
Anyway, too many books on the list to carry on with something that's giving me this much meh. Onwards.
I might have stayed for delightful prose or gripping characters, but the former was far more workmanlike (not a flaw if the story it's carrying is enthralling me) and the latter weren't doing anything for me, especially our poor little pretty rich boy hero. His sexuality has been interestingly and subtly flagged, but he's just got so much privilege that I can't say I'm particularly interested in his various crises; I did think that his faith was going to be an interesting element, but it seems to have been flimsier than anticipated.
Anyway, too many books on the list to carry on with something that's giving me this much meh. Onwards.
abookishtype's review against another edition
I saw this book discussed by the author on John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, as a part of his big idea series. In this series of posts, Scalzi asks authors to write about their inspiration or their line of reasoning about the premise of their books. The Edge of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass appeared a couple of weeks ago, and I happened to see it when I went to a Barnes and Noble a little over a week ago. In her big idea piece, Snodgrass wrote about her thoughts about the ongoing conflict between science (reason) and religion. Her idea was to take that struggle and amplify it, to the point where there’s an out and out war between the two...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.
bunny_watson's review against another edition
4.0
A religious fundamentalist would have an aneurism, then a book burning after reading this fantasy novel. Excellent story where the religions were created by beings from alternate universes who wanted to feed on the extremely nasty feelings most engender in humanity. Other beings fight to balance and save humanity through the pursuit of science and tolerance. Cop Richard Oort is caught up in this cosmic battle when he rescues a young sorceress and his own total lack of magical ability (a huge assett, it turns out) is discovered.
suggoiai's review
3.0
Copied from my Audible review:
Melinda Snodgrass wrote one of my favorite STTNG episodes. So when I saw she had written a novel, I was keen to check it out. The story didn't grab me until about 2/3 of the way through. The book felt like it was adapted from a previous project as a possible television script, which was distracting. The story itself seemed more like "our good reasonable magic vs their bad primal magic" rather than "reason vs superstition".
The narrators voice was fine and he generally read the story okay. He did a decent job differentiating voices. But once in awhile he would mispronounce a word, which would throw me out of the story. Also, at least later in the book, there was inadequate space given between scene changes inside chapters leaving me confused as we where we were and who was in a scene to start with; this may have been an editing problem rather than a voice issue, but it did affect the performance.
I'm not sure if I will continue with the series or not. At the very least, I'm going to take a break and see if the story stays with me.
Melinda Snodgrass wrote one of my favorite STTNG episodes. So when I saw she had written a novel, I was keen to check it out. The story didn't grab me until about 2/3 of the way through. The book felt like it was adapted from a previous project as a possible television script, which was distracting. The story itself seemed more like "our good reasonable magic vs their bad primal magic" rather than "reason vs superstition".
The narrators voice was fine and he generally read the story okay. He did a decent job differentiating voices. But once in awhile he would mispronounce a word, which would throw me out of the story. Also, at least later in the book, there was inadequate space given between scene changes inside chapters leaving me confused as we where we were and who was in a scene to start with; this may have been an editing problem rather than a voice issue, but it did affect the performance.
I'm not sure if I will continue with the series or not. At the very least, I'm going to take a break and see if the story stays with me.