Before there was life on Earth, there were beings in Eternity, which was a place of peace. The beings who lived in Eternity have never known discontentment, war, or any negative feelings. In fact, one of their rules is to surrender their emotions to Ancient of Days, who is their creator. Problems arise when Lucifer, the Chief Musician and Master of Ceremonies in Eternity, displays the emotion Pride during his display for the opening of the Resurgence of Life ceremony. His affliction with negative emotions grows worse and worse and begins to infect those around him. Gabriel and Apollyon, beings of Eternity who study the field of science, work to find a cure to this strange infection.

Lucifer is lured to the Black Hole by a voice in his head by the promise of answers to his affliction. Here, he meets Pandora, who he later finds out is on the same level as Ancient of Days, just on the opposite end of the spectrum. Where Ancient of Days is the creator of light and peace, Pandora is the creator of darkness and malcontent. Pandora is the source of Lucifer’s affliction and his contact with her causes his symptoms to get worse. Guilt overcomes Lucifer because he knows that it is forbidden by Ancient of Days to enter into the Black Hole. He begins to feel forsaken by Ancient of Days and sets out to band together the other infected beings to set up their own government without Ancient of Days. Will Gabriel and Apollyon find the cure to the affliction before it’s too late?

While this book does have some creativity in the basic concept of the plot, I would have enjoyed it more if Starr would have taken the time to further develop the plot and characters. The simple plot is continuously muddled down with the addition of superfluous information. The problem is re-summarized several times, since each character needs to be told what is going on. This repetition, instead of reinforcing the plot, makes it more difficult to keep the reader’s attention and only succeeds in bogging down the plot even more. The characters have no personality or individuality; they are just names to fill out the casting. Because of this, their dialogue doesn’t add any life to the story.

The audience for this book would probably be children and pre-teens (8-15), judging by the simple plot, large font size, and the glossary in the back of the book, which has the obscure words Starr uses as well as some of the more common words. Keep in mind that while this is a classic good vs. evil story, the religious overtones are very strong.
 

Reviewed on 09/18/2009 by ReviewTheBook.com Member Nicole Mahoney