I feel like I fell for the notorious booktok/booktube recommendation and had sky-high hopes for this book that is very favorably rated everywhere including Goodreads.
The plot took forever to start getting interesting. For the most part, the only plot that moves in the first 75% of the book is Orka’s, and it’s so incredibly boring.
Fight after fight, all she is doing is getting the next name in a long chain of bad guy hunting; None of the bad guys she encounters have any weight, because as soon as we are introduced to them, she is face to face with them and tortures them without any issues.
The fights are also very unimaginative. Besides wounds and the torture methods, combat is poorly described in ways such as; “…with thrusts from her Seax, parries thrusts and rolls, Okra stood above her now prone opponent…”
Maybe I am spoiled from R.A. Salvatore’s combat where everything is painted in my brain like a beautiful Mona Lisa, and I can picture every action perfectly… but this book had NO memorable fights, and 80% of the book was fight scene after fight scene.
Other people have said it, but both female POVs have the same tone, and Elvar had no memorable traits to be differentiated from Orka, who is the best POV in this book, unfortunately. She had one good scene where she wanted to defy her Jarl Disney princess stereotypes, and that’s all I can remember of her.
Varg has a predictable plot, which unfortunately starts immediately, and doesn’t move until the final 20% of the book, and then stops abruptly again.
‘Thought-Cage’ was cute the first 5 times, the remaining 65 times it was used was annoying.
So…
The combat is awful
The plot is limited and slow
The characters are boring, one deserves to be deleted and none of them earn any sympathy at all.
HOW is this book being rated so highly by so many critics?
It’s almost tied to Game Of Thrones in ratings, and that’s a compliment undeserved.
The book also can’t be a stand-alone epic adventure due to the cliff hangers at the end requiring you to read the 2nd book to get any satisfaction from reading the first.. which is a dreadful way to sell books.
End rant, I needed this off my chest.
by Virtual-One-5660
2 Comments
sorry you didn’t like it
I DNFd it because it was generic. I was also baffled at the reviews.
I dislike the Goblin Emperor and The Fifth Season but I recognised both books were doing something different that just didn’t resonate with me. Shadow of the Gods felt so paint by numbers I was mystified.