Lifetimes: The Beginning by Joe McFrancis

 Sophie is just your average girl from Ireland. She has some friends, is bored at school, and wonders what life has out there for her. Well, it comes in the form of Phoebe, who turns out to be part of history (literally) and has a mission for Sophie. Unlock her powers and save the world! Just another day in the life of a soon-to-be superhero…

The synopsis sounded great and I was keen to find out how Sophie was going to unlock her powers, what they would be, and how she would save the world. Some of these are touched on, but the story ends in a cliffhanger and felt incomplete. The author has presented a great idea about mythology and where it fits in with history that has so many possibilities about where it could go, but there is a lot of telling the reader about it and not enough showing.

First we look at the story. Sophie is whisked off to a military training school in Italy where she is meant to undergo combat training and learn how she will help in the war to defend Earth. There she meets a number of non-human classmates but only one features in any of her missions. We never really get the full picture about the classes at the school and what they did to further her powers. Things are mentioned (like her accelerated mutations) but sections could be fleshed out. Yet at other times, the same thing is repeated in a number of ways. Odd things occur like having a mission debrief after her first mission days (?) after it finished. Everything was turned into banter – surely jokes were not necessary all the time? And Phoebe constantly calling Sophie “girl” became grating.

Then come the editing errors. Action and dialogue tags were completely mixed, resulting in incorrectly placed capitals and punctuation errors. Quotation marks were used incorrectly when speech runs into more than one paragraph and the writing was awkward in a number of places like this: “Hi, Sophie! I’m Bob. Bob Miller,” Said to me, a nice dude with dark hair and blue eyes. Even the footnotes had errors: “Panini: Italian plural for panino, which in Elglish is just panini.”   

This is a fantastic foundational idea for a series and with a little tweaking of the story and the editing errors, it could spawn many sequels. Three out of five quills from me... 

Many thanks to Reedsy Discovery and the author for the opportunity to review the book.

https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/lifetimes-the-beginning-pino-de-francesco#review