A review by lsneal
The Godless, by Ben Peek
2.0
I was excited when I won an ARC of this book through the Goodreads First Reads contest, because I had heard a lot of good early reviews and was looking forward to reading for myself. Unfortunately, it failed to live up to expectations. Had I not felt some obligation to read it to the end for the sake of this review, I would have left it unfinished at the halfway point, and I almost NEVER leave a book unfinished. As it was, I had to put it down and read something else in the middle just to get back the will to continue on.
I will give this book credit for a couple of things - first, the concept of a world that is still coming to grips with the centuries-long process of the dying of all of their gods, and the fact that some of these dying gods' powers have a tendency to manifest in random people (sometimes with super-power-like results, sometimes destroying them and those around them completely) is really interesting. Second, I liked the racial and gender equity in this book. It took the time to describe EVERY character's skin color, instead of defaulting to white and only mentioning skin color if the person was an "other," and women and men occupied a variety of positions in society without that being much of an issue. So, kudos for that.
The problem was that the very interesting foundational concept and what could have been an interesting society to spend time in were not very well described or explored. Even given that the copy I reviewed was an ARC, with plenty of spelling errors and missing words that I expect will be corrected before the book actually goes to press, I was shocked at the overall low quality of the writing. There were tons of run-on and confusingly-worded sentences that I do not think were the fault of a hasty print job. Time and again, I found myself having to stop and go back to re-read a sentence or a paragraph just to try to make subjects and verbs match up, or to understand the basic gist, and this seriously detracted from the story. In addition, the story was a little thin and very choppy, jumping between multiple viewpoint characters, in the past and in the present, without much of a thread to connect the narrative. I couldn't help but compare this book to Brandon Sanderson's "Way Of Kings," with which it has a lot of superficial things in common: both are the first books of planned epic series, featuring jumps between multiple viewpoint characters, that end with a revelation that shows you that you are just getting started with understanding what is really going on in their worlds. Unfortunately, that comparison is not a good one for "The Godless." "Way Of Kings" shows how this SHOULD be done, with a really thoughtfully-imagined world that doles out enough details to let you picture the setting clearly, while also leaving questions that the reader WANTS to pursue to understand more in coming books, and with fully-developed characters that feel real. "The Godless" does none of this. I have very little idea about what the "Godless" world looks like, or its culture, before or after the dying of the gods. It's not that this wasn't attempted, it just wasn't very thorough or very good. The same goes for our characters. I felt like there was a lot of telling instead of showing what kind of people they were, and not much telling at that.
To sum up, it didn't really work for me, and I won't be continuing with the series.
I will give this book credit for a couple of things - first, the concept of a world that is still coming to grips with the centuries-long process of the dying of all of their gods, and the fact that some of these dying gods' powers have a tendency to manifest in random people (sometimes with super-power-like results, sometimes destroying them and those around them completely) is really interesting. Second, I liked the racial and gender equity in this book. It took the time to describe EVERY character's skin color, instead of defaulting to white and only mentioning skin color if the person was an "other," and women and men occupied a variety of positions in society without that being much of an issue. So, kudos for that.
The problem was that the very interesting foundational concept and what could have been an interesting society to spend time in were not very well described or explored. Even given that the copy I reviewed was an ARC, with plenty of spelling errors and missing words that I expect will be corrected before the book actually goes to press, I was shocked at the overall low quality of the writing. There were tons of run-on and confusingly-worded sentences that I do not think were the fault of a hasty print job. Time and again, I found myself having to stop and go back to re-read a sentence or a paragraph just to try to make subjects and verbs match up, or to understand the basic gist, and this seriously detracted from the story. In addition, the story was a little thin and very choppy, jumping between multiple viewpoint characters, in the past and in the present, without much of a thread to connect the narrative. I couldn't help but compare this book to Brandon Sanderson's "Way Of Kings," with which it has a lot of superficial things in common: both are the first books of planned epic series, featuring jumps between multiple viewpoint characters, that end with a revelation that shows you that you are just getting started with understanding what is really going on in their worlds. Unfortunately, that comparison is not a good one for "The Godless." "Way Of Kings" shows how this SHOULD be done, with a really thoughtfully-imagined world that doles out enough details to let you picture the setting clearly, while also leaving questions that the reader WANTS to pursue to understand more in coming books, and with fully-developed characters that feel real. "The Godless" does none of this. I have very little idea about what the "Godless" world looks like, or its culture, before or after the dying of the gods. It's not that this wasn't attempted, it just wasn't very thorough or very good. The same goes for our characters. I felt like there was a lot of telling instead of showing what kind of people they were, and not much telling at that.
To sum up, it didn't really work for me, and I won't be continuing with the series.