It’s all your fault. Really, it is. I’m blinking heavy eyes as I write this message to you, and I completely blame you for it. I haven’t stayed up late reading a book since high school, yet you have managed to conjure the trick not once, but twice in the last few weeks! I mean I just wanted to find out what happened to Bonnie and Billy, but then of course right before I found out, it switched back to Walter and Ashley. By the time I got back to Bonnie and Billy I just had to keep reading to get back to Walter and Ashley and co. You and that blasted story telling genius. I’m gonna have to get some more sleep before picking up another one of your books! š
Not since reading The Chronicles of Narnia have I been so drawn into a story. If I were to pick up a Ted Dekker thriller, I read a fast paced story full of plot twist and turns, mystery and discovery, but I am simply an observer to the action or an observer to anothers’ thoughts. When I read through these four books I was there! I burned with passion with Billy, I felt the cauldron of acid boiling in my stomach, I grabbed a hold of courage and risked my life, I became a man once again right there with these characters, I even reached for the sword at my side which wasn’t there, as I don’t typically have the habit of strapping it on before going shopping. There is something powerful in these pages that you have written and it goes far beyond the story, even beyond the strong Christianity message woven throughout; you write with a familiarity of the senses as though I have actually felt what I am reading, and even beyond that the struggles that the characters prevail through call my spirit up to greatness. Whatever you do, please do not stop writing, for God has planted a gift in your words, an invisible tie that connects to the reader’s spirit and nudges them onward and upward to Christ Himself.
Now, lest I come off as a Justin Bieber fan who found an author, I must offer my one critique. š I believe, though I certainly could be wrong, that there is a small story hole. Merlin and the professor are doppelgangers, so to speak, and everyone who had known Merlin was struck with the likeness even to the point of thinking the professor was Merlin, such as what happened in book 1 with Clefspear, all except for one: Devin. The principle, at the beginning of the book, had no idea who the professor was, though as the story progressed he certainly knew who Merlin was on a face to face level, I believe. So that’s the only thing I could find in the series that convinced me this was a piece of fiction and not history. š
So to reiterate once again, it is all your fault. I’m going to tell my wife to blame you when she finds me charging to do battle on her behalf, or playing with my children instead of video games, or getting up even earlier to read God’s word; it’s all your fault. š