I ended up buying Michael Travis Jasper's To Be Chosen: Second Edition because the author is a Twitter friend, and I enjoy supporting my friends.I'll be gentle here.
The plot concerns Roman, Blair, and Darby, three normal humans who find themselves given powers by Jehovah themself to become God's Hammer. Roman, a businessman gains the power of healing, Blair's Witchcraft becomes amplified, and Darby gains some kind of kinetic abilities. This happens in the first 3 chapters.
We find out demons, who turned their collective backs on G-d, live on the planet Gehenna, and most of the planets they have conquered are named after various Hindu deities or sephiroth. We have literal angels running around, friends of the Avatarn (the collective name for the trio), and quite a bit of betrayal and death.
And mostly, we're racing around at breakneck speed with no room for character development or a chance for anyone to register as more than a blip before dying or betraying everyone else. Hell, we get two babies who grow up nearly overnight at one point.
I mean, I see the moral he was shooting for, but it comes at the cost of narrative... we get so many deus ex machinae to give away plot points that it starts feeling like "Hey, I need this to happen, so here it is." I fond myself wishing that instead of trying to cram so much into one book, maybe perhaps it be spread across a trilogy so we had a better chance to get to know everyone and maybe care about them when they die, betray, or go nuts. Emotional moments where the dead come back to reveal plot points are blunted by the fact we didn't really get to know the dead beforehand, so them reappearing with some piece of random information feels more like "I'm sick of trying to write this section, so here's what needs to happen to get us closer to the end."
While it held my attention, I don't know it's one I'd read again.
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