Eclipse of the Sun
I could not put this book down. The author knows how to paint his characters but leaves you hanging with several as to what happens to them. Is the author going to write a sequal and reveal what happens? I hope so. This is appropriate to what is happening in our present times. It made me stop and think of things discussed in my political science class at school. Think about what has happened from FDR TO our current president.We have come full circle to another depression where families are losing their homes and the bottom has fallen out of wall street.Look back at the history of this country for the past 80 years.This book is dead on.
I want to love this but...
The scope of O'Brien's Last Days series is expansive and imaginative. The books have interesting characters and a well developed underlying world-view. His plots, although perhaps a bit "over the top", are instructive and like much good fiction, leaves his readers with a more focused lens for interpreting the world around them.
So why I am disappointed? The answer is that these books could have been so much better with disciplined editing. The motivation for murdering obscure journalists and nuns are implausible, even for the minions of Hell, and a prophesy or some other motivation should have been provided early in the book which would explain why these groups were specifically targeted. Numerous other plot flaws abound, many of the characters are one dimensional stereotypes, and the dialog is extremely stilted in places.
O'Brien has a wonderful imagination, and writes instructively. (One hopes that his characters' literary and theological name dropping will inspire readers to pick up Aquinas, Czeslaw Milosz, and Hans Ur von Balthasar) His books are still worth reading despite their flaws. He simply needs to be paired with a better editor who can help offset his weaknesses and help him to bring his work to the next level. We need someone like O'Brien writing works that are at the level to become literary classics.
Excellent book
This is O'Brien's last book from the "Children of the last days" series. It's quite fat, but I have read it in a few days (during my exams week :-). I highly recommend it for anyone who read previous books. I am not a native english speaker, but I had only little problems reading it. Go and get it!
Beauty
This novel is about beauty. It is my favourite book, and is closely followed by all the rest of the Children of the Last Days series. I'm not a catholic; I'm not even a Christian (gasp!), but this book has made me think a great deal about a deeper meaning of life.
Excellent but meandering
Michael O'Brien continues his excellent Children of the Last Days series that began explosively with Father Elijah in this third part of the Delaney family trilogy (the first two books are Strangers and Sojouners and Plague Journal).O'Brien is obviously an excellent writer, but he tends to be overly didactic in his novels. A better editor could have helped with that. O'Brien, as most talented writers do, also overwrote his novel. And, again, a better editor could have helped him pull out the extraneous material which could have been included in a collection of short stories in an additional book.
Having said that, O'Brien continues to show keen insight into issues that haunt Western society and the Western church. A committed Christian with traditional Catholic faith, he decries the secularization of the church, including the domination of our lives by television. He presents a bleak view of Western governments, filled with nefarious conspiracy theories that are both audacious and plausible at the same time.
As huge as this book is, O'Brien keeps his readers turning their pages because of his wonderfully human characters and intriguing plot.
(26 reviews)
