Unusual and a little bit odd. It’s interesting, but it's not for everyone.

Thank you to Netgalley and Beaver's Pond Press for providing this book.

Amazing storytelling from start to finish. Drawn in with the descriptions and world building. Would definitely recommend to others.

I tried reading this book over a span of a couple months...and I found it difficult to get into. There are other darker books out there, but this one was not one of them. I seemed to lose interest with each time I picked up the book.

Emma Addison has been through a lot in life. Her older brother died when she was young and she felt somewhat responsible for the death. Her parents die soon after. She is left with an aunt who does not like her and an uncle who likes her “too much”. Running from that bad situation to an eventual grown-up life with a job, a boyfriend, and surrogate parents. Eventually that all falls away too. So Emma turns to the supernatural and inadvertently summons the devil. Whether what Emma sees next may be real or may not be but it sure is interesting.

The cover and the summary for this book drew me in. I was raised Catholic but have questions about religion. I, like Emma, have found interest in many ideas from all religions intriguing. So many things that Emma goes through mirror some of my life in ways I can not explain. As weird as it sounds I feel like this book was meant for me. Even though this is a fictional book with fictional characters that tie in our reality with many religions and myths it just seems feasible.
The book is fast paced and sometimes scary. At least to me. As I begrudgingly read the end, I was okay with how it did end.

I would not change anything in this book. I do submit a warning for Christians who feel strongly in their beliefs and do not like to question them. This book may not be for you. If you have an open mind, give it a shot but just warning you.

I have looked all over the web for more by author Virginia Weiss. Alas, I can not find her or any more works. Just throwing this out there but Miss Weiss if you read this I would like an interview for Confuzzled Books Blog. Eager to see more of your writing.

https://confuzzledbooks.blogspot.com/

This book was a baffling, jumbled-up mess filled with pop psychology, made up mysticism and serious misconceptions about Christianity and God.
Its such a confusing mess, that it took me months to read it, it was like running a marathon, I had to just keep slogging through it.
I tried to give it a fair shot, but I don't like or understand this book. With apologies to the author, I simply cannot recommend this book.

Emma Addison, a timid agoraphobic, accidentally summons the Devil, awakening powers in her she never knew she had.

This is an odd book. With such a simple, straightforward premise, you would think the plot would move in a certain direction but nope. The story meanders all over the place. Emma loses her boyfriend, her job, gets magic powers, loses, them, meets new people, the Devil pops in from time to time, and all the while I’m wondering; “Where is this going?” I compare the feeling of reading this book as a walk in a beautiful forest on a trail you have no map of but everything is lovely to look at. The writing is good, Emma is a bit of a saint but I enjoyed following her on her journey; even if it did lack focus. 3 out of 5.

I tried to get halfway through it but it's not my thing. I got really bored of the endless conversations interspersed with endless ruminations on religion. Way too wordy, in my personal opinion, though it's a very intriguing plot. I just didn't get into it.

I don't know, this story seemed to be all over the place - Christmas, the devil, supernatural, eastern religions abusive boyfriends, violent punks, an evangelical tv preacher, a young pregnant girl and an angry anti abortion crowd. It reads like a feverish dream that I would rather just wake up from and be glad it wasn't real.

4.2 stars
An intriguing read, especially for people comfortable and interested in exploring a variety of religions through a fictional tale. We start with Emma Addison, a lonely young woman with Issues, who manages to her surprise to summon the Prince of Darkness himself to her living room on Christmas Eve. At first, my impression of Emma and the setting was of Bridget Jones' Diary as the only reason we are given at first for this daredevil act is that Emma just broke up with her boyfriend Henry. However, as more is revealed of Emma's background, then she became more like Job from the Bible. Suffice to say she has been dealt a bad lot in life and has experienced much loss and pain, almost to the point where I felt the author was overdoing it. (At one point, I thought she was the Angel of Death since everyone around her seemed to drop dead).

Lucifer, well, he is charming, suave and sensual. Persuasive, sarcastic and cynical. Glimpses sometimes of hidden grief or rage at God. The characterization and appearance remind me of Lucifer from the TV show of the same name. Through an 'exchange,' he leaves Emma with certain powers which all have their own consequences. Through her journey, Emma interacts with other celestial personifications, notably Buddhist Goddess of Compassion and Mercy Kuan Yin and Hindu Goddess Bagalamukhi, a mahavidya or wisdom goddess. Emma seemed to be more enthralled with female goddesses. She also learns about or references tantricism, tarot card reading, Sufism, other members of the Hindu pantheon and aspects of Buddha, the Jewish faith. However, the base foundation for discussion seems to be still Judeo-Christian with Lucifer, the Christian God, Christian concepts of heaven and hell, Adam and Eve, angels Gabriel and Michael. In a jarring surreal scene, Lucifer interacts with Kuan Yin and tells her not to bother waiting for him (in a sly reference to the Buddhist Bodhisattva's vow). However, if we are to adopt a Buddhist mythological world as a framework, then there is no Satan but a King Yama who is Lord of the Underworld. Reincarnation plays an important part in both Buddhist and Hindu belief, which was missing in this theological discussion. Chinese legends also reference 18 levels of hell and not just one. Instead, Kuan Yin in this novel oversees a card game (?!) with high afterlife-changing stakes.

A compliment of this novel was that I could never predict what was going to happen next. Emma goes through some thoroughly fantastical situations, also goes to hell literally. Sometimes she is almost unbelievably naive or kind-hearted. Does she enter into a Faustian bargain with the devil and what happens?

A very unique and thoughtful work which raises interesting questions about the duality of good and evil, the importance or futility of intent, faith. I hope it gets a wide readership and the invariable discussions to follow.

Thanks to Netgalley and Beaver's Pond Press for providing this book for review.

Enjoyed reading. Ms Weiss was able to capture my attention from the first page, her descriptions of Lucifer were chilling & real. I found myself processing good, evil, faith versus timing & bad luck. A good escapism read .

A very interesting telling of what *really* happens when you summon the Devil. If he feels like it, of course. And then, too, there's all the others he lets in through the now-open door.

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I hate to end the year on a down note, but while this novel of good and evil, and of the supernatural, had some things to recommend it, after reading more than 400 pages I expected a much bigger reward than ever was delivered. At the end I felt relief that I was finally through it, but also resentment that the author had taken a portion of my life that I would never get back; I felt I'd wasted it reading this when I could have been enjoying something else in my reading list.

The novel was way too long. It needed some serious editing. I usually avoid books this long for precisely this reason: that it's not such a chunk of your valuable time to give up if the novel is short and it's bad, but when it's both bad and long, it's really irritating. It's even worse when it keeps teasing the reader with the promise of better things to come and never delivers. There was a phrase used in the novel which with some irony I think applied to the book as whole: ponderously clanking links! That's how it felt: like a series of short stories loosely connected rather than a coherent novel.

If the book feels like it's awful right from the off, I DNF it without even a pang of conscience because life is too short to waste on bad literature. The problem with this book was that it kept on promising something good was coming, yet in the end, nothing arrived. The ending itself was a horrible disappointment. It simply fizzled, like even the author herself had tired of this story and wanted over with just as much as I did. Some anally-retentive people will doubtlessly try to argue that it’s disingenuous to dump a book as unworthy without giving it a fair chance, but whenever I do give an “iffy” novel a fair chance, as I did here, I’m inevitably disappointed, so yes, I think you can ditch a novel guilt-free if it is not thrilling you. What’s the point of reading it otherwise? I think its a reader’s duty to DNF a bad read.

Some parts of the book were a joy, but as soon as I started to think maybe I would read a little more, it drifted back into tedium, and then I'd start to think about ditching it, but it would offer a promise of improvement. That's how the whole book went! I found myself skimming parts and thinking it was time to ditch the book; then I would find another interesting piece to read and it brought my hopes up again only to find them dashed again as the story dragged on without - quite literally - going anywhere except in circles. It was as bad as that book where you read through it only to find out at the end, that it was all a dream. And if you found the foregoing tedious to read through, then I achieved my aim and made you feel like I felt while I was reading this novel!

The story is of Emma Susanne Addison. She's close to being a shut-in, but not quite. This itself made little sense, because when she wanted to go somewhere, she had no real problem going there even if it was quite a way from her home, yet she was constantly whining about being scared of big open spaces, even as she lived right in the middle of the city.

This pseudo-phobia went back to a tragic incident with an unsavory uncle which took place not in the city, but in the woods by a river in winter. It would have made sense to me if she were afraid of older men, or afraid of the woods, or afraid of the winter, or afraid of the river, or afraid of ice, but she wasn't. She was inexplicably afraid of open spaces. In her case, this phobia made no sense. People's knee-jerk reaction when you say that is that phobias almost by definition don't make sense precisely because they are irrational, but even the most irrational phobia has rational roots. In this case it did not, and so I could never take it seriously.

Emma's life is beset by tragedy, but in the end you cannot help but feel she brings a lot of things on herself. I did not like her as a character. We're told in the blurb that Emma summons the devil one Christmas, but that portion was written so poorly that I missed it. I went on to the next section of the novel and started reading it like it was an entirely new story. I was thinking, “Wait, when did this happen?" and the truth was that it did not happen - not in the way the author thinks she told us it did. I went back and checked! It was like a whole section of the book was missing.

It was written so hazily that what the author thought she was telling us happened didn't actually feel like it happened at all from the reader's perspective; at least not to this reader. But the offshoot from this is that Emma is now somehow in some sort of preliminary bargaining with the devil - not actually a contract but at least a verbal agreement, yet this goes nowhere. And when I say the devil, I mean the big guy himself. We're constantly told that Emma is a special snowflake which is why he comes personally, but nowhere in the rest of the novel is there anything to explain why she is special or even to suggest that she is! She felt more like a spacial snowflake, and the personal attention made no sense.

What made even less sense is that there was another supernatural being involved - and this one was from Chinese mythology. I never did figure out what her purpose was because it was never explained, and this lack of clarity became even further muddied at the end especially when we had characters from other mythologies appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. It was like the author had some great ideas, but could never settle on a good set to include, and worse, tried to include them all, but could never quite figure out how to successfully integrate them.

The offshoot is that Emma develops super powers (yep, and there was a kitchen sink tossed in there, too)! Emma doesn’t go flying around with a cape, but she can choose outcomes and see them appear in the real world. Or can she? Maybe she was dreaming that too! I can’t tell you, because the author never told me! I kept reading on hoping it would l make sense, but it never did. I do not read prologues and epilogues. They’re antiquated affectations. Put the first in chapter one, the last in the last chapter, and be done with it for goodness sake! Quit with the self-importance and pretension. I skipped the prologue here as I always do, and I did not miss it as I never do. Thinking I had missed something at the end of the story I actually did skim the epilogue, but it contributed nothing. Hence my resentment.

There were other oddities such as the public library being open the day after Christmas. This seemed highly unlikely to me. I don't know. I don’t live in same city as Emma did, so maybe it is, but it sounded unlikely to me and it struck me more like the the author wasn’t properly thinking through what she was writing. This feeling was further enhanced when I read, ”Her hair is glorious, so black it’s almost blue….” That phrase has always struck me as utterly nonsensical. I expect it of typically clueless YA authors, but not of one who can actually write. I can see what an author is trying to say when they write an asinine phrase like this, but tripping yourself up in writing bad prose isn’t a good idea. Black with a sheen of blue or a hint of blue or a blue highlight works, but when something is really black? It’s black, period.

So, in short, I was truly disappointed in a book that initially sounded so promising. I wish the author all the best; she can write if she can learn to curb the meandering, and I think she has some great novels inside her, but this was not one of them, and I cannot in good faith recommend it.