A review by daaan
Godblind by Anna Stephens

2.0

Not for me. I tried to read this 3 times, making it 3/4 of the way through this time before thinking "the ending is obvious", skipping to the end to confirm and putting it down. To be honest, the ending was obvious about a third of the way through the book, I kept reading in the hope there would be complications or deviations that would throw it off course. That made the whole experience feel like reading backstory, I would almost be interested in reading the next book if it wasn't for my other major problem. I didn't find any of the characters particularly compelling: ruthless warlord, power hungry cleric, jealous princeling, cryptic mystic, ultra tough female soldier, all pretty stock, the novelty is that they are all turned up to 11. They didn't have that third dimension that made them jump off the page like say Stehlen or Wichtig from Manifest Delusions, Logen Ninefingers or Glokta from First Law or Jorg from Prince of Thorns. Part of the problem is that the POV shifts so frequently that you hardly explore past the surface of the character before whoosh you are looking at someone different. That made the audio for this almost unlistenable (that's why attempt no.2 crashed and burned). More than anything, it reminds me of Prince of Nothing, but with more POVs, another book that had very few living characters in it, that also seemed to be mostly interested in chronicling an event rather than telling a story, and had a first book filled with back story.