Fourth Chronicles of Illumination

The Library of Illumination #9

by C.A. Pack

Imprisoned on a distant realm—her love life in a shambles—Johanna Charette wonders how to extract herself from the Terrorians’ grasp. She needs to resolve the threats against the Library of Illumination and protect the people she holds dear. But how? She’s changed, ever since engaging with a secret society of wizards, and believes magic is growing inside her. Meanwhile, her feelings about Jackson remain unresolved.

Unfortunately, the battle to control all the Libraries of Illumination is about to explode. Their lives are in peril. And every bit of knowledge that everyone on every realm previously had access to could be stripped away, plunging future generations into stone-age ignorance.

456 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 3, 2018

About the author

C. A. Pack is the author of the episodic YA fantasy seres, The Library of Illumination and can usually be found wandering around inside her imagination looking for fun things to write about. Some people may think that's a stupid place to hang out, but for her it's really quite pleasant.

She is currently at work on her seventh adventure in the episodic Library of Illumination series and on her fourth novel featuring Evangeline. She's an award-winning journalist, and former anchor/assignment manager at LI News Tonight in New York. She thinks fiction is a lot more fun.

A current member of International ThrillerWriters, and Sisters in Crime, C.A. is also a former president of the Press Club of Long Island. She lives in Westbury, NY, with her husband, a couple of picky parrots, and dozens of imaginary characters who are constantly demanding page space.

Reviews

[Stjepan Cobets · Rating 4 out of 5]

My rating 4.0

The book Fourth Chronicles of Illumination (The Library of Illumination # 9) by C.A. Pack is well written and I have to admit that the author has a very great imagination. This is YA Sci-Fi-Fantasy book and book is full of events because the action is happening in all realms associated with The Library of Illumination. If I went to describe a short action that happens in a book I should have a fair number of pages. But I try to summarize it all in a few sentences: The leader Terroriana Nero 51 attacked all the realms with the Timing Machine and Nero 51 trying to capture all the people who were caught and taken to the camps. But fortunately, Johanna and Jackson managed to alert members of the Overseers in time, so most realm ready for Terroriana's attack. The war that is happening will bring many victims because Nero 51 is determined to rule to all realms. No one is sure if they will survive this merciless war. All fans of the YA genre that mix fantasy and science fiction could enjoy this book and the whole series.

[Scott Spotson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Way too many characters to be able to keep track of what is happening in this book. It's like various forces of disparate beings are vying for your attention, but you as reader are so distracted that you can't care about any of them. I got the overall impression that octopus-like villains called Terrorians were trying to take over this fantasy world, but their progress seemed painfully slow as various bands of strange creatures called attention to themselves. In a way it's like Bailey's Comets, where various rollerskating cartoon bands of competitors vie in a worldwide race. Knowing that the dastardly Terrorians weren't going to take over the world anytime soon, the tension flattened considerably.

Somehow during the mayhem, teenagers survive angst, including a pregnancy subplot that seemed just weirdly out of place. You'd think that teenagers would also fight the Terrorians, but they must not be deterred from having their own troubles too. I couldn't believe how the would-be mother handled her own predicament, which was quite poorly thought out and of weak character.

I'll give the author credit for imagination, but this work needs a major re-do.

[Noor Al-Shanti · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book tries to do a lot but fails at pretty much all of it. And the reason it fails is that underneath all the flashy ideas, events, and characters the author didn't give us a reason to care. Now I understand this is a middle book in a long series, so maybe if you've read all the previous ones and are an avid fan you already care so deeply about the characters that you won't mind this, but I honestly doubt it. The stakes just aren't there. There's too much going on and at the same time too little of consequence or substance.

I love world-building, and I can see that the author tried to build an interesting, huge universe for this story to take place in, but world-building isn't just about coming up with names and places and ideas, you have to somehow breathe life into them, make them interesting and unique and human and give the reader a sense of the stakes and the depth of the world. None of that was there in this book.

The story starts off pretty much in the middle of an invasion. There are all these libraries on different worlds that are connected together somehow and one of the curators of one of the libraries decides to invade all the other worlds through the different libraries. The action keeps switching from one world to another, from one character to another. There's so much telling and so many minute details, including the "overseers" reading people's minds and communicating telepathically and making up random and pointless plans that seem really weak and ineffective considering they have so much power and supposed wisdom.

There are people fighting for their lives against the invaders. And a lot of use of "decimators" and all kinds of shootouts, hostage situations, imprisonments, and even internment camps and diseases and through all this the writing was so impersonal and shallow that I just didn't care about a single character. And then in the midst of all this action there's a teen drama going on that revolves around who is going out with who and who dumped who and what happened at the prom. Wow.

I stopped reading this book several times. I read three other books in the middle of trying to read this one. I got back to it and just couldn't. I tried skimming and it just made it worse. And then eventually I tried again and just forced myself through. Maybe it's just me, maybe it's just not my type of book, but I have read books I downright hated before, but they pulled more emotion out of me than this one.

It's filled with all kinds of things from all kinds of places just slapped together. I don't even know how to categorize it. You have magic. You have science. You have a world with robots and a world called Comedia or something where people all ride pigs and live what I think the author thought would be "hilariously simple" lives. You have a character who speaks exactly like Yoda. You have a planet of "Millitaires" who - you guessed it, are all fighters. You have a character who for some reason turns out to be Merlin. I could go on, but it would take a book as long this one to just introduce a tenth of the characters properly. Literally every few pages, just when I thought there couldn't possibly be another character or world introduced I suddenly came across a new scene with a new person introduced for seemingly no reason.

The most interesting character in the whole thing was the selfish Logan who is pretty much a terrible human being that cares for no one other than himself, but he at least had a semi-logical plot-line where he wanted stuff and worked towards it. But man he was a terrible person. *shakes head*

Most of the time the book read like an awkward synopsis of events where the author was trying to cram as much information onto the page as possible. That's inexcusable. You're writing a huge series with 9+ books, relax and take the time to delve into the characters' struggles and motivations. Take the time to make us care and actually weave all the strands of the thousand pointless events you came up with into an actual story people will care about.

Like I said earlier if you've got to this book you probably already like the author's writing style and won't care about a thing I've said, but I had to put it out there. I would recommend the author try focusing on one or two characters at most and just focus on coherent plotting and making emotional connections with the characters.

[K.J. Simmill · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Library of Illumination is in danger. Knowledge is power, and with each one having their own diversity there is a danger of one becoming supreme. Why should they not all be the same when uniformity would answer questions with one decisive stroke, and how can this uniformity be brought about? The answer is simple, to destroy them all but one . And someone plans to do just that. War is coming, a war that will decide the fate and wisdom allowed to be retained in all the realms, and it falls to Johanna to intervene, but she has her own problems, whisked away and imprisoned by the Terrorians she must first find a way to free herself and her unexpected allies. Will the realms lose all they fought to protect, or can those on the side of wisdom and freedom of information prevail against astounding odds? Find out in C. A. Pack's Fourth Chronicles of Illumination, The Third Book of the Knowledge is Power Trilogy (Library of Illumination 9)

Within the pages of Fourth Chronicles of Illumination you will find an enormous universe filled with different species, cultures, understandings, technology, advancements, and beliefs. Certainly an impressive undertaking which C.A. Pack does not shy away from. The complex design of the work is a testament to the sheer amount of time and consideration that would have gone in to its production. Wars and battles, alliances and prejudices, this book has everything you would find in the real world, but on a monumental scale. Good and bad, it is there for you to discover. As the third book in the Knowledge is Power Trilogy, during the first part I felt I would have benefitted from have read the preceding books, the plot does come into its own to a level you can almost forget others came before it. Some of the characters have a very distinctive style of dialogue, some of which would draw similarities to popular movies in the science fiction genre, but whilst dialect is similar, the individual characters are in themselves unique. This is a massive adventure, with lots to be take in, possibly the kind of book you'd want to read more than once to get a full appreciation for everything that happens. Characters develop nicely and relationships change, as would be expected. This book was a good read, and I am curious to know all the details that led to the current predicament. If you like science fiction which has some great depth then you'll find Fourth Chronicles of Illumination has a lot to offer.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Has promise, but is sunk by grammatical, structural, narrative, and character issues

I'm not one to give a one star review lightly, and I dislike having to trash something that someone put a lot of work into. C.A. Pack's novel starts off with an alright premise for her book, and I felt that if executed properly the end result would have settled into a three or four star review. Sadly, there is a lot wrong with this novel.

The novel starts off on a good foot with the intro, which begins to establish the characters of the story and the events to follow. However, grammatical and structural issues with the writing began to jump out at me, as well as a rather heavy handed focus on telling instead of showing. The odd choices in how to convey conversation, as well as the flat and emotionless way of conveying the dialogue, left me with little connection or excitement in the scenes. Characterization also seemed flat and sometimes lifeless, and people often did not converse in a way that was natural in my opinion.

The Narrative focus is all over the place—the constant narrative shifts jarred me out of the immersion and made it difficult to remember how certain characters acted or behaved, which became more of a problem with the number of characters brought into the story. Events seem to just happen, and often times events were taken care of off screen, making the happenings that were clear enough to be understood all the more boring. Some scenes were also incredibly short. The story itself was rather hackneyed to be honest, with the author even calling attention to the ham fisted mish mashing of science fiction cliches early on. The story doesn't know what it wants to be, and tries to be a story about combat and everyday life teenage life-- the latter really had nothing to contribute to the story. The author also relies on a combination of bad exposition (telling characters info they already know to inform the audience) and exposition dumping, which drags out the experience. Other elements of the story were introduced out of thin air or were not properly explained. I had difficulty ascertaining the relevance of quite a few scenes, and ultimately the story itself wasn't able to hold my interest.