Twilight of the Past: A Rift in Time
Michael Parziale
Reviewed by Sarra Borne
Twilight of the Past is the first in a science-fiction
series by debut author
Michael Parziale. In it he introduces
the reader to the world of Aldurea, which is embroiled in an ongoing
and epic
battle between two major powers. The
protagonist, Newl Rift, is the leader of the Guntra De who is at war
with the
Spero. The war has been going on long
enough that new technologies have emerged, including fabulous
communications
and anti-missile systems.
With very little preparation Newl sets off on a quest to
discover the truth about himself and the truth about the war. In a
typical boy
meets girl story, the second half of the book consists of Newl
attempting to
save his love interest from certain death at the hands of the Spero,
all the
while fighting off doubts about the trustworthiness of his lady love.
This book reads like a computer game. Newl
sets off on random quests for no
apparent reason; other than perhaps a mysterious stranger says that he
should.
He conveniently suffers from amnesia so there is no real explanation of
his
past. The narrative isn’t very cohesive,
the author jumps between present and past tense often in the same
paragraph. The ending is left completely
on a
cliffhanger with only the promise of book two.
This book suffers from one of the latest trends in
publishing – where an unfinished story is marketed as book one of a
trilogy or
series. It used to be that books were
released as series’ when they were simply too huge to be a single novel
(i.e.
Robert Jordan “The Wheel of Time”, J.R.R Tolkien “The Lord of the
Rings”) now
publishers are cutting stand-alone novels into parts and calling them
trilogies. Twilight of the Past at only
224 pages is certainly not huge and it leaves the reader wondering just
how
many $15 episodes they are going to be forced to purchase to find out
what
happens next.
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