Review of "Thy Will Be Done," by Julie Fisher

Review of

Thy Will Be Done, by Julie Fisher ISBN 9781478719656

Three out of five stars

 This book starts out as a tragic love affair, turns into a story of the conflicting power of the good and evil sides of the occult and then ends as a power play within a combination of the Christian religion and those that believe in karma. Nicholas is a poor immigrant from the British Isles shortly after the start of the twentieth century and he works well with animals, specifically horses. This lands him a job at an estate where Ellen Wilkins lives. He first set eyes on her when she was in a store where he was working as a delivery boy and he fell hard for her at first sight.

 It was not long and she is experiencing the same feelings, but her family was totally opposed to any contact between them. They were determined that she marry Lyle, the son of wealthy parents. When an engagement is announced without Ellen’s consent, she is terrified and makes plans to run off with Nicholas. However, he mysteriously vanishes without a trace and the story immediately moves to the present, where a man named Luke is suffering from debilitating nightmares involving a woman that he calls Ellen.

 Luke is a professor of history and the content of the nightmares keeps him from establishing a relationship with a woman. The rest of the book develops the story of Luke’s background, the reasons for his difficulties and why he is so important to the human race. The story works very well until the end when it shifts from a tale about humans to a tale about more powerful beings.

 I enjoyed the novel until it reached the end, a plot device that I found equivalent to that of powerful magic. The main difficulty that I have with sword & sorcery books is that the heroes always have an escape clause, powerful magic previously unknown. That is essentially how this story ends, something that I found most unsatisfactory.