Review: Children of the Cross

Title: Children of the Cross

Genre: Paranormal

Author: Lawrence Van Hoof

Published: April 2012

Publisher: Lawrence Van Hoof

Available at: Amazon   – Smashwords

A golden fireball crashes into the Walters’ car during their drive to the cottage for summer vacation. Thirteen-year-old Cora survives without a scratch. Her twin brother, Nathan, spent two weeks in critical care and endures months of rehabilitation.

Nine years later, Cora works as a high-end call girl in Toronto and looks after her brother, who began suffering from schizophrenia during their last year of high school. On the streets, meanwhile, a supernatural mafia hunts for the Light. None of them knows where it will manifest. None of them knows how it will manifest. But their leader, Teresa, believes the Light is her only chance to destroy their progenitor before he wakes from his centuries-long sleep.

When their search finally bears fruit, Cora’s daily struggles explode into one for the twins’ very survival, perhaps requiring the ultimate sacrifice of all.

I received a free copy of this book for an honest review.

The Good:

The character development in this book was well done. You got a definite sense of each person.

I don’t necessarily find fault with the author’s style of writing. It’s very easy and smooth. He transitions from the view point of Cora the call girl to her brother Nathan to Alex, a soldier in the “supernatural mafia” well.

The author is also good at visual descriptions. I could picture the streets they walked very well. I could picture the dresses Cora wore. I could see Nathan’s apartment. It all came vividly to life.

This is a great dark and gritty novel. It gets into the harsh world of what it means to be a call girl. No illusions are left for the reader as to what a hard life Cora leads as she takes care of her schizophrenic brother.

The same can be said for Alex. As he fights off the nightmarish psychic hold of “the Father” with alcohol, his life is nothing but hardship. All his friends and loved ones have died or been taken away from him. This is starkly laid before you.

The Bad:

If anything, this book was too dismal and depressing. there wasn’t a single ray of hope until the very end. Reading it took extreme effort.

Cora’s life was so hard, I didn’t understand why she didn’t throw in the towel and run away. Instead we are given to understand she is some sort of church-going angel that sticks to what she believes is her duty no matter what.

If it weren’t for the blurb, I would have really had to puzzle out that Nathan was her twin. It barely mentions that fact. Yes, he’s her brother but her twin? No, that fact was only glanced at.

As for Alex? What a lost cause! He was running around town on some hell bent mission that I never did end up figuring out. I think it was revenge but he was also looking for “The Light”.  All the while he’s chugging beer after beer after beer in an effort to drown out “the Father”.   I got sick of his throwing beer bottles at the walls and his search for the next beer.

Then there was “the Mistress” and her hopelessly devoted soldiers. She was unstintingly cruel and spoiled. Yet she commanded the devotion of all these men? It just seemed skewed and wrong. She didn’t seem like the head of a “supernatural mafia” so much as a spoiled child given a bevvy of servants.

What about Paul? There are a whole lot of unanswered questions about him. So many I can’t enumerate them here without giving away too much of the story in case you do decide to read it.

And what about those weird sexual dreams Cora kept having? What was the point of those? Were they just meant to unsettle the reader? They seemed wildly divergent and off the mark. Not to mention disturbing.

The climax and resolution were chaotic and confusing. I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on. There was a kidnapping. They confronted “the Father”. People died. There was a big showdown. There was a happy ending? What? What just happened?

This book was like a buffet where you were just given an end table.

My experience with this book was most unfortunate. Your experience might be different. If it is, I’m willing to have a discussion.

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