A review by fishface
The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman

adventurous fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

I can give this a lot of credit for how pacy and readable it is. Basically everything else about the story is a bit shit though lol. The characters are weak, especially the women, who exist exclusively to tempt and decieve the 14 (!) year old main charcter. Ew. The worldbuilding also frustrates me. The author has chosen to almost exclusively borrow names for countries, peoples and cities from real life ones, without paying any heed as far as I can tell to geography. It surely isn't trying to be an alternate timeline Earth... as all the locations wouldn't make sense... so why didn't the author just make up place-names? In addition the main religion is evidently a recreation of Christianity, complete with crusaders (the redeemers) so why not just commit and call it that when everything else has been given an Earth name. 

However, I must (slightly shamefully) admit it was still a good time and fun read :))