The Spirit Well continues the saga of Kit and Mina, who use ley line travel in their quest for the skin map's secrets. Although they don't have the whole skin map (it was torn into sections), they still have come a long way in mastering inter-dimensional travel. Library Journal, on the Amazon site, gives a good little rundown of the plot HERE. A cast of characters find themselves in ancient Egypt, the Stone Age, Damascus, an Italian monastery, and 13th Century Oxford, among others. All are connected in some way to the map.
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I have read and reviewed the previous two books in this series and enjoyed them immensely. Lawhead has a writing style unmatched by any author I've come across. He's not overly wordy like Hugo or Tolkein, but he can definitely set a scene while forwarding the story. My head spins to think of the knowledge and research that went into this bear of a pentalogy.
That said, I admit if there was such a thing as time-travel lag (akin to jet lag), I may have contracted it while reading this book. There were so many individuals in so many places/times that I had to remind myself nearly every chapter what/when was happening. Not to mention that one realizes that when an author lists a full two pages of characters at the beginning of a novel, a bit of concentration will be in order. Perhaps I wasn't up to the challenge, but at least Lawhead gave us a list. And a forward of sorts explaining what had happened previously. (That being true, I caution readers to not start with this installment, but please start at the beginning and read all the books in order, or you will be hopelessly lost.)
The plot moved forward well and ended in a good spot. I will admit that at first, I erroneously thought that this book was the last in the series, not the middle one. Oops. Already having read half the book, I kept thinking there was no way Lawhead could wrap everything up yet. No way. So I consulted the web and found that indeed there were two more novels to go and breathed a sigh of relief.
I highly recommend this series for anyone who likes Lawhead, fantasy, legend, sci-fi, or imaginitive fiction of any sort.
In conjunction with the CSSF blog tour, I received a copy of this book for review.
