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Lisa Divirgilio lisadivirgilio — This book came out at the height of the Twilight craze. I stumbled upon it several times on my bookstore runs, and although it fascinated me, it somehow never fascinated me enough to be numbered among the books that I bought at the end of the day. A few weeks ago, hungry to spend every dollar of a Barnes & Noble gift card I'd received for my birthday, I saw this book again, rejoiced, and snatched it from the shelf. I was thrilled that I'd waited for the paperback, not just because it was cheaper, but because the back cover told me that it contained deleted scenes and an author interview, thus making it more definitive. My appetite had been whetted further by postings on the author's blog (which you should most definitely read) about its conception. Gail Carson Levine loves a good setting; this time, instead of creating a medieval or fairy tale-esque world, she used ancient Mesopotamia as inspiration. Only inspiration, mind; she was striving for a certain "feel", not strict historical accuracy. I loved that idea. I read the book pretty quickly (it's not long), and found that quite a few previous reviewers were right. Compared to the author's other work, Ever isn't up to par. It has some lovely elements--this is Gail Carson Levine, after all--but they don't come together in a way that works, and the novel feels as vague and formless as if it took place in a cloud bank. Furthermore, I didn't agree with the religious stance it appeared to be taking. The book was inspired by the Biblical account of the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter, a story that upset me very much when I first read it. Jephthah, who was fighting in a war, made a promise to God that, if his side won, he would sacrifice, as a burnt offering, the first person to congratulate him on his victory when he returned home. Unfortunately, that person turned out to be his daughter. The daughter accepted her sacrifice, but asked that she might have one more month to live, during which she would go into the mountains and mourn her own untimely death. Needless to say, this particular passage from Scripture is overwhelmingly popular with atheists and agnostics everywhere, who cite it as proof that the God of the Christians is a cruel and bloodthirsty dictator, not a loving Father who died for our sins. The truth is that the Old Testament, full of blood and war and all the worst examples of inhumanity, shows, time and again, what happens when man turns his back on God. Mosaic law strongly condemned human sacrifice, but, at the time when Jephthah was living, human sacrifice was rampant in almost every other religion out there--and the Jewish people often lost their way, deliberately or accidentally, and followed the wrong gods. The story of Jephthah's daughter was a historical account of a terrible tragedy, caused by an attempt to bribe God with an innocent victim; if anything, it's there because it shows us what we, as Jews and Christians, have to avoid. Unfortunately, affected by the terrible story just as deeply as I was, Gail Carson Levine did what thousands of people have done, and put the wrong spin on it entirely. Kezi, the heroine, is Jephthah's daughter in an alternate universe. Levine loves to give her heroines talents as character traits: the Snow White-inspired heroine of Fairest is an exceptional singer, Addie of The Two Princesses of Bamarre is a poet, and each of the fairies in Levine's Tinker Bell books is born complete with a talent and a category--kitchen fairies, animal fairies, music fairies. No exception to this rule, Kezi is armed with the dual character traits of dancing and rug weaving--and sadly, not much else. The dancing works well as a theme, giving her at least a certain liveliness and adding rhythm to a few scenes. The rug weaving doesn't lend a whole lot to the story; honestly, it really only serves to give other characters a reason to admire her. "She weaves such beautiful rugs!" Kezi's family lives in a monotheistic region, where everyone worships a god named Admat--a god so obviously inspired by Yahweh that it isn't even funny. ("As you wish, so it will be" is a recurring catchphrase among his worshippers.) No one ever does anything without thanking Admat. Kezi's equally pious. But there's an interesting conflict of symbolism in the very first scene involving her. When she's almost bitten by a snake, her Aunt kills it, and Kezi feels "close to tears". I was eerily reminded of Addie's kidnapping by the dragon in The Two Princesses of Bamarre. It almost killed her…but it was so beautiful! When Kezi's mother becomes violently ill, her father promises Admat that, if his wife survives, he'll kill the first person who congratulates him on her recovery. Conveniently, he can't tell anyone not to congratulate him, because that would be cheating. Equally conveniently, oaths to Admat are, apparently, only binding for three days. So if the family can just avoid everyone for three days, it's all good. Admat's most devoted follower is the family's servant, Nia, and, even though Gail Carson Levine loves to give even the most evil characters a redeeming quality or two (the aforementioned dragon was downright lovable, even though she was planning on killing the heroine), she didn't even bother with Nia. The very first mention of Nia reads as follows: "Nia rests her elbows on the high table. Her face is blank. She smiles only when she is praying." And then there's this, taken from the "Extras" interview in the back of the book: "Do you like all your characters equally? I don't admire Nia, the pious servant who cares only for Admat and not for the people she's lived with most of her life. I'm crazy about Senat [Kezi's father], even though he swears his awful oath and then tells the priests about it. The mistakes he makes are made out of love--love for his family and love (as well as fear) of his god." Fair enough, but Senat fails as a stand-in for Jethpah, for several reasons. In the first place, he's trying to save his wife, not his own hide, and in the second place, he's pretty sure that he won't have to sacrifice anybody at all. He refuses to hire a "masma", or sorcerer, to curse the snakes out of his house, because Admat doesn't approve of sorcery--even though Kezi thinks it would be pretty neat to see a sorcerer (and Levine seems to agree with her). Jethpah was the exact opposite, willing to take on the beliefs of other people's gods, willing to kill an innocent person as long as he got a victory out of it. Similarly, Admat's "holy text" is quoted, and while it's clearly meant to sound like the Old Testament, a lot of it seems to directly contradict scripture. Like this: "Admat's anger, easy to arouse. Hard to placate. Beware the wrath of Admat." Whatever happened to "Slow to anger and abounding in kindness"? Remember what I said about the sorcerer? A lot of sorcerers of the time practiced human sacrifice. And so did a lot of polytheistic religions, which is why it's so ironic that, when Kezi ends up slated for the One God's sacrificial altar, it's the gods (one god in particular) of another region and religion who instantly swoop in and save her. This book transfers the practices of one religion to another, setting up the merciful religion as the bloodthirsty. Olus, whose chapters alternate with Kezi's, is a seventeen-year-old wind god who's been watching mortals for years, because he finds them fascinating. Conveniently, he finds Kezi especially fascinating. Although he doesn't want to drink her blood, there's definitely a touch of Twilight going on here--the stalking, the immortal who loves at a distance. Kezi eventually notices him and thinks of how handsome he is--and tellingly, she adds in her narration, "These may be sinful thoughts, but I don't see why." I don't see why, either. Kezi was all set to get married off before Olus showed up, anyway. Even in the book's twisted fictional version of Judeo-Christian belief, I don't see why God would find anything wrong with a teenager having an innocent crush. When Olus tells Kezi that he's a god, she gets upset and overwhelmed--"'Don't say that!…Admat, you are the one, the all!'" She cowers, convinced that she'll be punished because someone called himself a god in front of her. Again, doesn't make sense. Ultimately, Olus and Kezi decide to go on a quest to make Kezi a "heroine", for once she becomes a heroine, she has a stab at becoming immortal and therefore unkillable. (This is said to have happened once, and only once.) A good enough start, but the missions they end up going on are predictable and stale. Olus has to face his greatest fear (he's claustrophobic, interestingly enough--"I am the god of the winds, and I hate confinement. Shame on me! I fear it…") while Kezi ends up in a pretty typical Lotus-eater world, where she is given a new name and has to break free of the spell to find Olus again. One element that threw off the book a lot was the constant viewpoint switching, with some chapters being only a page long. There wasn't enough difference between the voices for the device to be either interesting or clear, and it ultimately distracted from the story itself. I also thought that the romance itself was handled badly, especially compared to the romance of, say, Ella and Char in Ella Enchanted (which was humorous and believable). Olus and Kezi have a few nice moments, but for the most part they seem to do little but kiss. Some of the elements I liked were Olus's aforementioned claustrophobia (it's a shame that it was his only real character trait), his humorously touched-upon friendship with a mortal boy, Kezi's climactic change from mortal to immortal (it's refreshingly low-key and involves dancing and godly wine), and a few of the descriptions. (Kezi in the lotus-eater underworld: "A dozen sleepy mice seem to have made their home in my mind. When I try to think, a mouse curls up on the thought and snores. The thought collapses with a gentle shoosh." Later, she gets a compliment: "The mice in my mind wriggle happily." And in the first scene, Olus describes his birth, appropriate for a wind god: "I thread my strong wind into her womb, and my strong wind thrusts me flying out.") I disliked the use of the present tense--again, distracting. A very few books successfully pull off the present tense (I might mention The Hunger Games and The Mystery of Edwin Drood); this one doesn't seem to, in part because everything's divided into choppy sentences that ring, at times, of easy-reader books. The stream-of-consciousness makes for some silly moments, too, such as when Kezi thinks a scream: "Aaaaaa!" (Not even any italics.) All this made more sense to me after I read the interview at the back of the book: "Originally, I thought Kezi would have to die, and in my earliest draft she does. At that point the book was intended for an older audience, high school at least. But I'm not comfortable as a writer of tragedy, and my wonderful editor…persuaded me that my approach was suited for an older middle-grade audience…" I can only guess that Levine took "middle-grade" too seriously, and simplified her writing when she softened her ending. As for a potential tragic ending? I disagree, generally, with the notion that a happy ending is inherently less "deep" than a tragic one. If anything, a writer of comedy or non-tragic drama has to work harder to make a meaningful ending than someone who, say, wins the reader's sympathy by killing off as many characters as possible. But in this case, Levine has this to say about her original idea: "In an earlier version, I imagined something called lij time, which moves much faster or much slower than ordinary time. I had Olus become a lijok, a god who can control lij time. He puts himself and Kezi into fast lij time so that they can be together for many years before her sacrifice." Wait. I understand that, as an author, she decided she didn't want to do that…but, if handled right, that ending could have been so breathtaking. Not a traditional happy ending, but at the same time not exactly a sad one. And to have Kezi and Olus live a whole life together before her sacrifice--it would have worked so well with the story's theme of time running out. It's a shame she didn't use it; it would have been a bold step, and might have even saved the book in my eyes. As it is, Kezi is made immortal (who didn't see that coming? Although the transition scene, as I said, is wonderful--very rhythmic and poetic) and is asked what she wants to become the goddess of. She choses "'uncertainty'", also known as "'doubt'"--"People need an uncertain deity. They should question the gods. The people of Hyte should doubt Admat's holy text and his wrath against his worshipers who love him." If there's one thing this book doesn't respect, it's plain old faith. And while I stress that questioning a god who demanded human sacrifice would be a good thing, that's not our God. Setting up a figure to be as much like the all-loving and merciful God as possible and then turning him into a blood-craver is simply Levine's way of introducing a traditional skewed aesop: only doubt and disbelief are sacred, and only doubt itself may be worshipped as God. It's a message that seems, like another deity of ancient times, to swallow itself in a way that's disturbing, but whatever. Before I go, let me quote the author interview one more time, because I think that this quote pretty much describes the whole book: "The lovely part of historical fantasy was that I could dip into both history and my imagination. If the facts didn't fit my story, I could abandon them. Religion is a good example of this: The major religion in the real Mesopotamia was state religion. Ordinary people worshipped minor deities and changed allegiances often. But a state religion didn't meet my needs, so I didn't use it." Right. Because to deconstruct an extinct state religion wouldn't meet the author's need to denounce the God that millions of Christian and Jewish people still worship. The decision was not an aesthetic one; it was a decision made for an agenda. Knowing the author's mind is a great help in knowing the book itself. I'm definitely still glad that I waited for the paperback, and not just because it was cheaper.