After close to a month of waiting with baited breath I was thrilled to finally receive my 7 Hours Anthology omnibus. With stories from mostly well known Christian authors: Michael Dellosso, Rene Gutteridge, Travis Thrasher, Tom Pawlik, Veronica Kendig, James Andrew Wilson, and Robin Parrish, I was eager to start reading and discover what awaited me!
Overall my opinion is positive of 7 Hours; corners were not cut on the writing and fiction editing of the omnibus, nor did the stories seem underdeveloped or out of place in the overall scheme of things. Also, and very importantly, Thomas Constant was fantastically "constant" throughout each piece.
As I said, my opinion is relatively positive of the omnibus as a whole, but not everything was roses. I found that reading story after story which, without exception, had people dying at the end was slightly morbid and a bit redundant. Had I split the reading up over the course of a week instead of finishing most of the anthology in a day, this may have not been an issue.
I was surprised to see that all the characters had some change of heart and profession of faith before their seven hours were up; I'm not sure this was the best route to take in each story, I found myself being distracted by it as it appeared in every story. Perhaps this was a requirement in the writing?
My last negative I must mention is the formatting: I was not impressed with the job done. The first few stories' formatting was fine, the last few were slipshod. Repeatedly scene breaks weren't even separated by a header or multiple line breaks. This detracted from the reading, the stories themselves, and my feel on the omnibus overall. There is no reason for sloppy formatting on an anthology designed for Kindle.
In conclusion, the stories were creative, well written, but slightly redundant as well as being dogged by formatting errors as the anthology wound down.
I received this book as a free review copy from Tyndale Publishing and was not required to write a positive review.
