Cloak Of The Light

But his mind wouldn’t stop buzzing…. Was he going crazy? He’d seen movies of people, some of them very famous and intelligent, who experienced hallucinations. How real were they to those people? Drew had never been so unnerved or scared in his life. If he wasn’t crazy, then these invaders were real. And if they were invisible to humans, how extensive was their power? Could they read his thoughts…or perhaps even control them? He closed his eyes… If only he could close out the fear as well.

Book:Cloak of the Light, War of the Realms Series #1 by Chuck Black, Multnomah Publishers, 2014

Genre: Supernatural/Speculative Fiction
Target Audience: Boys 16+
Subjects: Angels and Demons, Death of a loved one, Friendship, Faith, Love
Summary: Life just falls apart after his dad’s death, completely falls apart. The only thing left keeping Drew sane is the times he escapes into the wilderness with his dad’s friend. With this help he manages to survive the rest of high school. In college things seem to go well – for a time. Then an experiment goes wrong, Ben vanishes and Drew… well, something strange happened to him. He’s not sure what, but starting with the moment right before everything exploded he has been seeing things – some kind of invaders. He doesn’t know who they are or how they got here but one thing is for sure: they want nothing but death and destruction for all mankind.
Notes: The first in the Wars Of The Realm series, Cloak Of The Light speculates “What if an unbeliever could see the spiritual forces in the world around us? How would they interpret what they saw? And how would they respond to it?”. Drew is not a believer and does not appear to know much about Christianity but a girl he is very attracted to is a Christian and gives just a hint of truth to Drew. By the end of the story he still has not realized that what he is seeing are angels and demons. The story is clearly building up throughout the series rather than giving answers in the first book. He does learn quite a bit about Christian principles of love and service from a church he gets connected with. The biggest spiritual content benefit to this book is the end. After the story is finished there is a very thorough discussion guide with verses explaining where each of the elements come from and pointing readers straight to the truth of Scripture. With that guide, my rating is a 5, without it a 3. I suspect the series overall will be a 5, just not book 1 by itself.
Spiritual Content Recommendation Scale: 5/5
Reviewer: J:-)mi

Ephesians 6:12 – For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Thank you to Blogging For Books for providing me with a free review copy of this book.