Elijah Valentine is a mage, and apparently the last of his kind.  He’s been around since at least the time of George Washington, doing what he can to see the big picture and keep the world from getting too out of control.

However, this isn’t a black and white story where being an all-powerful wizard is easy, heavens no.  The story starts with a scene where a woman attempts to assassinate Valentine for not solving drought in Africa.  He has to use magic to show her a weather model of the planet, and how diverting rain to the desert would destroy the planet’s eco-system.  She’s taken away by the police struggling with the concept that having God-like powers doesn’t make life easier.  If anything, it makes you want to get involved less for fear of screwing things up.

The story’s structure is of a memoir.  Valentine is recounting a crisis called "The Event" to a biographer, so the text goes from the circumstances surrounding "The Event" and the future after it, where society is trying to analyze what happens and the Writer is interviewing Valentine on the details.

There are some minor typos and the only way to get from chapter to chapter that I can see are to click links in the sidebar, so the site could do with some restructuring.  However, the text itself is engaging, so if the a structured linking system between chapters and a Table of Contents could be set up, that would be worthwhile..

The memoir is first-person narration, and it ably depicts Valentine as a clever, insightful man a bit bored with his surroundings and striving to help situations without overpowering them.  The writing is crisp and intriguing as he outlines how he offered to help George Washington protect America, and only now in the modern setting of the story has a president thought to take him up on it. 

For there’s a mystery brewing, involving Homeland Security and the CIA, and only Valentine can help.  These events, suspenseful enough on their own, will lead to "The Event," which apparently saw most of the United States disappear into a chasm, and Valentine stretching his powers to the limit to put it back the way it was.  The whys and wherefores are unknown to the world, and now Valentine is ready to explain.

After reading only three chapters, I’m looking forward to hearing his entire story.

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