By: Sandra Williams
Most stories about angels start from the same assumption. Angels are good. The battle is between them and something darker. The human caught in the middle has to choose the right side and survive.
Jacqueline Pennewill’s The Book of Eternity starts from a different place entirely. And the difference is what makes it genuinely interesting.
Angels, in the world she has built, are not uniformly good. They never were. The history of angels is a history of conflict, hierarchy, and beings who were thrown from heaven for reasons that still echo through the centuries. Jacqueline knew that story was there. What drew her was the complexity hiding inside it.
The Research That Opened a World
Before she started building the mythology of The Copper Moon Series, Jacqueline went looking for what actually existed. She researched the Nine Orders of Angels and the history of fallen angels, the beings expelled from heaven and what that expulsion meant, for them and for the world they fell into.
What she found was a whole universe of conflict and history that most stories had barely scratched. She used that research as a foundation, building loosely from it rather than rigidly upon it, and created two rival factions: The Surge, who uphold order, and The Fallen, who wreak havoc.
The setup on the surface looks like a clear moral divide. It doesn’t stay that way.
The Copper Moon as Symbol
The title of the series comes from a celestial image Jacqueline felt was the perfect visual anchor for everything the story explores. The Copper Moon is a rare atmospheric event, a moon that appears when conditions align in a specific way, suspended between the ordinary and the otherworldly.
She describes it as a fragile line between light and darkness, heaven and earth, mortal and divine. In the story, the Copper Moon marks the moment when those worlds touch, when something supernatural stirs in the shadows of the ordinary. It is a moon of reckoning and renewal, a reminder that even in darkness there is still light.
That image threads through all three books in the planned trilogy, appearing in different forms but always carrying the same weight.
Why the Angels Feel Human
One of the most deliberate choices Jacqueline made in building the supernatural world was keeping the angels human in appearance and human in behavior. They have been moving among people for centuries. They were human once. They have histories. They have been shaped by experiences. They feel things.
The most challenging part of the writing process, she says, was making sure the fantasy world never overshadowed the characters. She didn’t want Grey or Zale or any of the others to be swallowed by the mythology. The relationships come before the fantasy world. That was her guiding principle, and it shows in how grounded the story feels despite its extraordinary premise.
Chiaroscuro on the Page
Jacqueline has always loved chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark in both art and literature. It’s a concept from visual art, the technique of using strong contrasts between light and shadow to give depth and drama to an image.
In The Book of Eternity, chiaroscuro isn’t just an aesthetic choice. It’s a structural one. The entire story lives in the space between opposites. Good and evil. Human and divine. Grief and healing. Love and danger. Nothing in the book is entirely one thing or the other, and that complexity is what gives it its particular texture.
She came to the story, she says, because the blurred line between what is real and what isn’t has always fascinated her. She has always loved dark characters. She has always been drawn to the other story, the one hiding underneath the version everyone expects.
The Book of Eternity is that other story.
If you’ve been waiting for an angel story that doesn’t play it safe with good and evil, The Book of Eternity by Jacqueline Pennewill is available now on Amazon. The Copper Moon rises. Nothing in its light is quite what it seemed.
