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A review by john_nygma
Sons of Darkness by Gourav Mohanty
Did not finish book. Stopped at 26%.
Dnf @20%. I very rarely dnf books, but I just can't continue with this one.
The prose is way too dense and overstuffed with info dumps of names and titles that we have no idea about what they are. Also, after 170 pages, I've yet to meet all of our main characters. The many POV changes and inclusion of a gazillion characters also don't help with the general confusion I felt while reading this. I could not tell you what the main plot is; I honestly don't know because the prose is so dense that it's really hard to follow the endless conversations about politics that we have no understanding of.
This book tries way too hard to be Game of Thrones, and it was quite frankly a bit annoying *how* similar it felt to GRRM's series at times. At least GoT, while not perfect, has a clear and engaging prose that doesn't constantly irritate me. Also, I get that this is darker high fantasy, but is all the misogyny and sexism really necessary? Especially when it's not contextualised/addressed within the actual story? This feels more like "oh we're doing GoT dark fantasy, so it has to have violence, especially against women, plus lots of misogyny because that would be 'historically' accurate". You're not writing a history book, this is fantasy. If you include misogyny and, from what I've read in other reviews, r*pe, just because of that, then you might wanna reconsider writing about those issues...
I do enjoy the general idea of the book. Indian mythology sounds super interesting, and I think we need more fantasy stories inspired by/set in non-western cultures. Unfortunately, this just wasn't the book for me. Maybe I'll come back to it sometime in the future, but I really can't see myself getting into this right now...
The prose is way too dense and overstuffed with info dumps of names and titles that we have no idea about what they are. Also, after 170 pages, I've yet to meet all of our main characters. The many POV changes and inclusion of a gazillion characters also don't help with the general confusion I felt while reading this. I could not tell you what the main plot is; I honestly don't know because the prose is so dense that it's really hard to follow the endless conversations about politics that we have no understanding of.
This book tries way too hard to be Game of Thrones, and it was quite frankly a bit annoying *how* similar it felt to GRRM's series at times. At least GoT, while not perfect, has a clear and engaging prose that doesn't constantly irritate me. Also, I get that this is darker high fantasy, but is all the misogyny and sexism really necessary? Especially when it's not contextualised/addressed within the actual story? This feels more like "oh we're doing GoT dark fantasy, so it has to have violence, especially against women, plus lots of misogyny because that would be 'historically' accurate". You're not writing a history book, this is fantasy. If you include misogyny and, from what I've read in other reviews, r*pe, just because of that, then you might wanna reconsider writing about those issues...
I do enjoy the general idea of the book. Indian mythology sounds super interesting, and I think we need more fantasy stories inspired by/set in non-western cultures. Unfortunately, this just wasn't the book for me. Maybe I'll come back to it sometime in the future, but I really can't see myself getting into this right now...