Welcome to my third entry in my occasional series regarding books I have read that are popular on #BookTok. Here are the previous posts:
The Hit
Fans of action-packed fantasy will thoroughly enjoy The Shadow of the Gods by John Gwynne. Norse mythology, gnarly monsters, and battle scenes to die for make this read a wild one. The characters aren't half bad either, and several are fairly memorable. Indeed, Gwynne keeps the action, monsters, and solid characterization throughout the Bloodsworn Saga.
My problem with this series is that the motivations of all the characters, and there are many to follow, are essentially the same: bloody revenge. For several, another motivation is reunification with lost family. At times, this made characters become jumbled in my mind. I had to stop reading and consider for a moment which warrior hellbent on revenge I was with.
Even with this fault, I still enjoyed these books enough to try out a second series by the author.
The Miss
Based on my brief forays into #BookTok, Malice is the series starter for books even more action-packed and fun than Gwynne's Bloodsworn Saga. I was duly disappointed. The characters were uninspired, the secondary fantasy world unmemorable, and the action nonexistent. Granted, I did DNF this book, so maybe the action picks up eventually. However, I feel I made a valid attempt to get into the story, but found it lacking in every metric.