A review by paracyclops
The Godbreaker by Mike Brooks

adventurous challenging emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted mysterious reflective relaxing tense fast-paced

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

4.0

The concluding book of Mike Brooks' God-king chronicles, The God breaker is an entertaining epic fantasy that subverts a few of the genre's tropes. It's a sweeping, multi-perspective epic, but one in which some of the threads fail to connect at all at the conclusion, and in which the genre's usual offering of a dramatic, heroic, and violent solution to the problem of 'evil' is radically undercut. Brooks is also rigorous in his dedication to queer representation, and his questioning of gender norms, using his very plausible worldbuilding to explore those themes without needing to force them. All this doesn't make The God breaker a particularly 'deep' novel—these are its terms of reference, and as a story it's a straightforward multi-thread narrative, with its thematic materials all right there on the surface. Personally, although I like long books, I like them a bit denser and more unpredictable than this, but it's an absolutely exemplary bit of epic fantasy novel-making, and for readers of that genre who crave something more in line with contemporary mores than its monumental classics, this will be right on the money.