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A review by marie_reads_shiny_books
The Orphanage of Gods by Helena Coggan
1.0
I had higher hopes for this title considering it was selected by Illumicrate for an exclusive edition, and typically they try not to waste nice paper on trash writing.
This was a strange, rambling story. Broken up into sections by character POV, once the character has had their POV-in-the-sun, they fall back into a flatness so shallow an atom could puncture their character arcs. Not that the POV was that fantastic to begin with.
The relationships between the characters are severely dysfunctional - I’m assuming some of that is intentional due to the trauma of being abandoned children raised in an orphanage with the threat of being un-alived at any moment hanging over their heads. It could also just be poor writing as an attempt at plot. But the dysfunction was just bad. The MC trio has supposedly been together through all of these traumatic experiences, they consider themselves brother and sisters, and then you throw some outside conflict and power tripping in and BAM! One’s out in loopy land trying to kill another and then another one has up and decided they no longer love the other and are going to go and be in love with a character they met 5 days ago.
BUT LET’S ALSO HIT ON THE ICK OF SAYING YOU’RE SIBLINGS, REFERRING TO EACH OTHER AS SUCH, AND THEN INTERJECTING A SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP INTO THAT. I’m sorry, just because GRRM and Pornhub say that incest is a thing, doesn’t mean it’s actually a thing. Authors, please stop flirting with this. It’s big ick. Rant contained, back to review.
The author kept harping on about power being corrupting and tried to do a surprise villainy twist at the end, and it just ended up invalidating the entire ‘premise’ - and I use that term so very loosely - of this novel.
This was like a whole bag of yuck filial relationships, extreme trauma & ptsd, manipulation, GASLIGHTING FOR DAYS, and some beautiful archetypes of ‘if your significant other is doing these things, you need to seek help immediately because you are not safe’ warped into the ‘passionately in lust’ tropes.
ALL WHILE HAVING NO PLOT. Like what was the point of this book beyond slaughtering trees and insulting their corpses by printing it upon them?
RIP trees.
This was a strange, rambling story. Broken up into sections by character POV, once the character has had their POV-in-the-sun, they fall back into a flatness so shallow an atom could puncture their character arcs. Not that the POV was that fantastic to begin with.
The relationships between the characters are severely dysfunctional - I’m assuming some of that is intentional due to the trauma of being abandoned children raised in an orphanage with the threat of being un-alived at any moment hanging over their heads. It could also just be poor writing as an attempt at plot. But the dysfunction was just bad. The MC trio has supposedly been together through all of these traumatic experiences, they consider themselves brother and sisters, and then you throw some outside conflict and power tripping in and BAM! One’s out in loopy land trying to kill another and then another one has up and decided they no longer love the other and are going to go and be in love with a character they met 5 days ago.
BUT LET’S ALSO HIT ON THE ICK OF SAYING YOU’RE SIBLINGS, REFERRING TO EACH OTHER AS SUCH, AND THEN INTERJECTING A SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP INTO THAT. I’m sorry, just because GRRM and Pornhub say that incest is a thing, doesn’t mean it’s actually a thing. Authors, please stop flirting with this. It’s big ick. Rant contained, back to review.
The author kept harping on about power being corrupting and tried to do a surprise villainy twist at the end, and it just ended up invalidating the entire ‘premise’ - and I use that term so very loosely - of this novel.
This was like a whole bag of yuck filial relationships, extreme trauma & ptsd, manipulation, GASLIGHTING FOR DAYS, and some beautiful archetypes of ‘if your significant other is doing these things, you need to seek help immediately because you are not safe’ warped into the ‘passionately in lust’ tropes.
ALL WHILE HAVING NO PLOT. Like what was the point of this book beyond slaughtering trees and insulting their corpses by printing it upon them?
RIP trees.