The first fantasy book that I enjoyed!

I’m not a fan of the fantasy genre. Maybe we should start with this. So I started not to read CRUX because I had expectations or landmarks, on the contrary, despite them.

And maybe that’s why I read it to the end. Because I was like a fresh land without borders in which the world imagined by Serban could take shape and evolve. Maybe this is why I was taken by surprise, because I did not asked for anything before, but I let the story grow naturally, I let the author’s world to get populated at the same speed the naration required it to do so.

This keyword is imagination.

I speak from my perspective as a person licensed in angelology. In other words, even knowing that it’s literature, it’s hard for a story to take me by surprise and get me intrigued in this field. And yet, I was. Not by the creatures imagined by the author, we are talking of same old characters, I think, in such works: angels, cherubim, demons, magic, etc.. But by how these are being described.

Andrei’s words describe in the most natural and profound manner the features of these beings. And believe me, the images offered are the most difficult to put in words. Let’s just mention planet CRUX itself, created by Innana, first cherub, exiled in an amorphous space, the demons torturing unjust souls in Hell, or immaterial creatures or creatures of an alusive materiality, or a being driven by such a mental structure, one might say, from the field of cybernetics, the monsters, and so on.

It’s a world reveiling all of these beings, the relationships between them, very well-established hierarchies and relationships described by internal logic. And all these beings acquire, in turn, shape the way in which the author expresses. Serban manages to create images that are available and print, in turn, in our imagination, as he saw them.

Yes, the story is as old as mankind. It’s about the struggle between good and evil, light and darkness, call it what you want. But the way the story is told… it’s all about courage and strenght to envision this strange and intrusive world.

About the story itself I will let you taste it for yourself, is too complex to summarize in a few words, and it would be a shame to take from you the pleasure to discover.

I will only say this: the characters in Andrei’s world, dont even get bored among themselves.