A review by laurareads87
The Gods Below by Andrea Stewart

adventurous medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.5

3.5, rounding up. The Gods Below is the first novel that I’ve read from Andrea Stewart. In the world of this novel, gods and mortals coexist, and the world has been divided into a series of regions with fairly strong boundaries between them. One by one, the regions are being remade: in a remaking, a wall of black ether spreads across the land, leaving the terrain lush and green, killing many mortals and irreversibly physically altering the rest. The novel begins with two young sisters, Hakara and Rasha, attempting to flee a remaking. 

There is a lot about this novel that I like. The magic system is well thought out and the world-building is rich and compelling. I like novels with multiple POVs. I also feel like the backdrop of the novel is well thought out; the dynamics between the different regions and the cultural and religious elements of each one are well developed and make sense. The prose flows smoothly, the pace is pretty consistent, and I was interested to see where the different plotlines would end up. What doesn’t quite work for me here is some of the character development. I was significantly more interested in some characters than others, including amongst the POV characters; two of the POV characters I found so extraordinarily narrowly focused on a single motivation that they fell a bit flat for me. 

On the basis of this first installment, I’ll definitely check out the second book in The Hollow Covenant trilogy. 

Content warnings: violence, blood, gore, body horror, death, animal death, murder, religious bigotry, classism, grief, abandonment, gaslighting, xenophobia, brief mentions of excrement & vomit