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A review by kitvaria_sarene
Godblind by Anna Stephens
5.0
This was bloody brilliant! Bloody both as gritty and as amount of awesomeness...
This is grimdark at is best! It is the closest thing I ever found to ASOIAF in tone and scope - it does read easier though. With Godblind I didn't feel like I would miss important stuff, if my attention waned for even just one second, and still it managed to be epic, have a lot of POVs and characters and an expanding world.
I loved the characters, and enjoyed following them and their growth throughout the books. They felt very realistic and changed over the course of the story. I especially enjoyed the good mix of female and male characters, that were very divers and not stereotype in any direction... (neither damsels in distress, nor ice cold assassins, neither heroes in glorious perfection, nor villains just for the sake of it.)
The world was set invitingly, and I'll be glad to return to it with the next installment - as I listened to the audiobook, I sadly didn't get to have the wonderful map in the Hardcover version, but I already ordered one for my shelf! I need this one to look pretty on there...
Some politics, but it never got boring, different factions and religions to follow and gods trying to get back to earth after being banished...
The plot was complex enough to keep me engaged and interested, yet easy enough to follow so I didn't feel like I needed a flowchart to be able to follow the story. It was varied and has different subplots, so it never gets boring.
The prose was perfectly fluent and I never once was thrown out of my reading "flow" due to a bumpy phrasing, or chapter breaks at the wrong moments.
It is proper grimdark, so not for the faint of heart. There are human sacrifices, torture, attempted rape, and all kinds of violence in Godblind. But they felt like a natural part of the story, and not at all like they were added just for the sake of it. And they are important for character development.
All in all I can't really recommend it highly enough - what an astounding debut!
This is grimdark at is best! It is the closest thing I ever found to ASOIAF in tone and scope - it does read easier though. With Godblind I didn't feel like I would miss important stuff, if my attention waned for even just one second, and still it managed to be epic, have a lot of POVs and characters and an expanding world.
I loved the characters, and enjoyed following them and their growth throughout the books. They felt very realistic and changed over the course of the story. I especially enjoyed the good mix of female and male characters, that were very divers and not stereotype in any direction... (neither damsels in distress, nor ice cold assassins, neither heroes in glorious perfection, nor villains just for the sake of it.)
The world was set invitingly, and I'll be glad to return to it with the next installment - as I listened to the audiobook, I sadly didn't get to have the wonderful map in the Hardcover version, but I already ordered one for my shelf! I need this one to look pretty on there...
Some politics, but it never got boring, different factions and religions to follow and gods trying to get back to earth after being banished...
The plot was complex enough to keep me engaged and interested, yet easy enough to follow so I didn't feel like I needed a flowchart to be able to follow the story. It was varied and has different subplots, so it never gets boring.
The prose was perfectly fluent and I never once was thrown out of my reading "flow" due to a bumpy phrasing, or chapter breaks at the wrong moments.
It is proper grimdark, so not for the faint of heart. There are human sacrifices, torture, attempted rape, and all kinds of violence in Godblind. But they felt like a natural part of the story, and not at all like they were added just for the sake of it. And they are important for character development.
All in all I can't really recommend it highly enough - what an astounding debut!