The Sending is a first time novel by Matt Koceich a resident of Texas and a public school teacher.
The Sending had one of the best premises I'd been able to delve into in quite some time: A man has the ability to see places in his mind. Seemingly cool, but harmless, right? Not quite. With a front of human financial backers the fallen angels want back into heaven and they want Mark to show them where the Garden of Eden is. But the viewing sessions are taking just longer than both of them thought. And for Mark, they're eating up time with his son Sam, and Mark's wife, Aubrey; who won't have finding the Garden destroy their family.
With this as a background, Mr. Koceich led us into a vision and `alternate reality' driven fiction book. I feel like there was plenty of material in the book. Plenty of information was shared and overall I don't think a lack of information caused a problem. However, I still felt in the dark for some of the time!! I believe that a different presentation of the information would have been useful. I found it easy to get lost in figuring out where the `real' Mark was until I finally decided it was co-vision and reality habitation, both running at once. That indeed helped some(If I was right). But I was already mostly done with the book by then!
A quality point worth pointing out in this book was the family relationship. I felt like their interactions were good and a real boon to the story line. Too often the family is just a base and then the story springs off. Here the story really revolved around Mark's family, and I think it worked beautifully.
The last thing I will mention was the vision-reality interaction. A large amount of time in the dream world I couldn't decide if what was going on was the real world being played out in this dream world. Or if the dream world was affecting the real world. OR if neither was affecting each other. Also, it seemed like sometimes he went unconscious to go there, and other times the chapters ran parallel confusing me more! Like I mentioned earlier, I believe all the information was there, at least mainly, but I think it needed a little reworking for reading ease.
In conclusion, it was a pretty solid first novel and I look forward to Mr. Koceich's next book and to see how he's matured.
See Noah Aresenault's review of The Sending here.
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