The Stone Crow

The Stone Crow - Lori Green I've been bored out of my mind with traditional romance, so decided to look for something different. This novella certainly qualified. It's a story about good and evil, emphasizing dichotomy with evocative writing that find beauty in the plainest things.Sara has the ability to see people who've been touched by heaven or hell, and she knows her Daddy is a demon. She's been hiding from him for years, protected by the "simple" man she recognizes as the closest thing to an angel on earth. Now her adopted father is dead and she has been found -- by Crow, who looks like a cowboy but claims to be a god who keeps the balance between Yehuda, the God who creates and Morningstar, the God who destroys. Crow wants to help her, but his powers are limited... and Sara will have to face great evil.The Stone Crow is not written in the language of high fantasy, but that of ordinary people, so it's not a dense or difficult read. But the story is somewhat ephemeral and hard to keep hold of at times, slipping without warning between dreams and reality; I didn't feel like I understood what was going on a lot of the time. What I most loved about the book is Sara's voice:"So I helped myself to food, drank like a woman dying of thirst and asked again for Crow to tell me who he was.'I'm a really old guy who likes to feed you.''Wow, a sense of humor too.' I tore some skin off the chicken and savored it, studying the man across me. I was sitting on the bed, my legs stretch out in front of me. I had almost been embarrassed about my unshaven legs and unpainted toenails but shame takes a lot more ego than I had. Crow sat in a straight backed chair he moved from the desk to the middle of the limited floor space. He was distant enough for safety but close to pretend friendship. We were building a relationship like a diving board on top of a volcano's mouth, not a very steady feeling."I found Sara's narrative totally gripping, even when she was writing about things I would really rather not read about. (Parts of the story are very violent.)Although this is listed as a paranormal romance, I decided to shelve it under fantasy, because it doesn't follow the standard romance "rules." If you're a romance stickler, this might not be the book for you; you need to be okay with a fair bit of ambiguity.