Title: Colandra's Crusade Angels, Demons and Possessed Cats Collide Author: Susie Pilkington-Wood Publisher: Fingerpress The idea behind this book is an interesting one - basically a vision of an afterlife bureaucracy involved in moving souls up, or down, the spiritual ladder, and a soul looking for its comatose body - but it doesn't succeed as well as it could. The prologue shows subtlety, attention to detail and insight in the writing, and the beginning chapters when Colandra finds himself in a rat's body and learns what has happened to him held my attention, but the early promise is not fulfilled by the rest of the book. There is a naivety about the writing that comes across as being a little shallow. Good and evil are too clearly defined and too rigidly judged. It's a simplistic vision which wouldn't, perhaps, be such a problem if it was well written. Unfortunately however, the prose is passive a lot of the time, with an overuse of various manifestations of the verb 'to be', … [Read more...]