Title : Jean Angel – The Child of Prophecy
Author : Atul Mohite
Genre : Fantasy
Pages : 74
I received this Review Copy from Half Baked Beans in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you Half Baked Beans and Book Marketing Consultant Richa Saxena!!
Blurb
Fifteen year old Jean was born in Zeasia but brought up in Kala Nagari, which is across the other end of the river. The reason for he not being raised in the kingdom where he was born is the fact that he was born out of an extramarital affair of Queen Tara with Shyam, who receives a tortured death as the king returns from his travelling. The Queen then decides to run away as the king begins to harass her for what she had done. She reaches Kala Nagari, where she lives with Radha who earns her living through providing service to the travellers. There, lives another traveller named Jean, raised as Radha’s son! Unaware of his origins, Jean struggles through school & becomes a misfit immediately as he goes through strange dreams & hallucinations of a person that he calls Angel. He stops going to school, soon enough, & takes all his training from Angel that includes physical training & controlling his emotions through meditation. The hallucination can be due to his excessive reading he does for understanding his personality, but he is too young to realize that. He carries a birth scar of ‘J’ on his chest that he is supposed to hide from others since it might look strange to the others. While the scar, is why he receives the name ‘Jean’ meaning the God is gracious. At Zeasia, King Robert continues to kill those suffering with mental illness since he believes in a prophecy that his kingdom will be finished by ‘someone who could see things that others cannot!’ Clearly, Jean qualifies as one such person. Will he bring the mighty king down fulfilling the prophecy?
Review
Jean Angel is a fantasy story which talks about a prophecy of a kingdom which is ruled by an evil king. The plot was fresh and anew, the author had completely transported the readers to this fictional world created through his words in no time and it was absolutely notable. But to the dismay of the readers there was handle full of plot holes which was misleading at times and these plot holes were kind of major ones. The one thing that was really disturbing was the failure of the author to express how exactly a character died in the story because at times it is said he died by suicide and on an other instance it was said he was tortured to death, which was very confusing.
And also the way certain characters behaved and spoke was really out of place and inappropriate, for example, how a character called Shyam who is a soldier in the kingdom converse with the queen like a friend and make a move on her almost immediately wasn’t apt and how Jean address the woman whom he believed to be his mother all his life as Radha Aunty once he finds out she ain’t his mother was kind of irritating. So the book completely lagged in character development and these characters sounded fake at many instances. Even though it’s a fantasy the characters should’ve been real and relatable and that wasn’t so with this book. On the brighter side the scenes which revolves around Jean was extremely nice to read and it was very fantasy-like while reading it.
The book ended almost abruptly without any closure and even the objective of the story wasn’t fulfilled. It felt like the author only uploaded half of the book and forgot to upload the remaining. It is hoped there would be a sequel because as of now the book is incomplete. That cliffhanger ending almost felt unnecessary and disappointing, it seemed like the author deliberately stopped the book midway for the sake of a sequel. It would have been really good if the author had release the entire story as a single book because the book wasn’t even that long and there was no need for it to be split up into two halves.
My views
To be honest, I kind of enjoyed this book at many instances, I haven’t really read a lot of fantasies, I’m majorly a contemporary book reader but this book came as welcome change and I liked it. The plot holes made me feel the book was a bit amateurish at times but it really inspired me to read more fantasies of this kind. I hope I’ll be reading more fantasies from now on. So, for that reason I should thank this book and its author.
If you haven’t read fantasies in your life or not a great fan of fantasy maybe you could start with this one, after all its a very short read.
My rating for this book would be 2.8 / 5 stars
Happy Reading Folks!!!
~ Meenu
