All in all, I'd have to say this book was pretty good. I love the modern day personifications of the different Gods, and Lucifer's character had me perplexed from beginning to end. Very deep character. On the negative side, I have to say that I didn't think the twins actually acted like real teenagers, much less like twins. Truth be told, I liked the main characters the least. Luckily, the rest of the cast is so varied and colorful that they cover up for most of the twins' blandness. Mortal Coils may not be the best book I've ever read, but it's the best *kind* of book: one that starts small and grows more and more complex and exciting until you can't put it down for the last third of its length. It's like that.The problem I had with Mortal Coils is that it starts a little too slowly. Its premise is intriguing, but it takes almost 200 pages for the book to get really interesting, and then probably another 50 for it to get GOOD. But from that moment on, it's unputdownable.(I just want to take a moment to note that, according to my spell-checker, "unputdownable" is an actual word, and that is awesome)Eric Nylund is a master of high-stakes storytelling, but this is the first time I've seen him build his own world -- and what a world it is. This effort, unfortunately, is what makes the first third of the book so slow. He has a lot of characters to introduce, and none of them is particularly relatable at first. Even the main protagonists. They may be introverted 15 year olds, but they've been raised in such a bizarrely dispassionate and repressive environment that I couldn't connect with either their behavior or their thought processes.It's all necessary, though. This is the story Nylund is telling. And while it may be distant or slow-going in parts, that's just because nobody has ever been through what the twins have been through, or what they're about to go through, before. What's ironic is that as the story goes on and Elliot and Fiona start going through their trials, the extreme emotions that come out of them make them much more relatable and sympathetic, because it's tapping into the human emotion we all feel. While being tested for godhood, the twins become more human. I liked that.And the tests are really where the story takes off. It may take 200 pages for the pieces to all be put in place, but once the first moment of peril is reached, it's like a snowball rolling downhill. It's like Nylund spends almost a book's length proving to himself that he can worldbuild with the best of them, and only then does he allow himself to do what he does best: thrill us. The lead-in may be long, the characterizations flawed, but the result is an investment in the world and all the characters that makes the amazing payoffs all the more satisfying, and to his credit, Nylund doesn't put a single detail in this story that isn't recalled in a meaningful way by the end.The one actual flaw may be the handling of both twins' love lives, which seemed more like the writer was going through the motions rather than actually feeling out the romances the way he feels out everything else in the story. Even that was forgivable and got a little better by the end.I'd highly recommend this book for anyone who is a fan of the supernatural, the mythical, the adventurous and the contemporarily fantastical. It may be a challenge, but the rewards are worth it.
