While I identify with her plight, she is just really hard to like as a person. Elvar is a princess who is escaping her family’s machinations to marry her off by running away with one of the many mercenary gangs that roam the lands. Elvar on the other hand goes through an interesting growth arc and has a coherent personality, it’s just that the personality is terrible. On the other hand, Varg is young and goes through a ton of growth over the course of the book, but he starts with almost no identity and very obviously feels like a reader insert character. She is a fully realized person who knows where she stands and doesn’t change at all over the course of the story. Orka is a deep and fantastically complex character but has this issue where she has already gone through her growth arc. The characters were an interesting mixture of positives and negatives. Orka loses something precious to her and leaves a trail of bodies as she goes looking for what she lost. Varg is looking to avenge the death of his sister and gets roped into a gang of mercenaries in his quest to find answers. Each of our main POVs is killing people for different reasons. Now, the humans who survived the terrible fall of the gods hunt their divine demigod spawn to rid the world of the gods’ taint forever. Vigrid used to be a land of mighty animal gods until their petty squabbling resulted in a fight to the death and broke the world.
We follow three different characters (Varg, Orka, and Elvar) murdering their way through the land of Vigrid, a battle plain where the gods fell. The plot of The Shadow of the Gods is very straightforward. Both are entertaining, filled with exciting action, have a mixture of good and bad characters, and have a plot that is both more and less than I wanted. I watched the new Mortal Kombat movie right as I was finishing The Shadow of the Gods, and I was a) surprised at how much I enjoyed the movie and b) found myself realizing that my thoughts around the movie mirrored my thoughts on the book. This time he takes on Norse mythology and incorporates it into a new epic fantasy trilogy called The Bloodsworn Saga. The Shadow of the Gods is the first installment in a brand new series by John Gwynne, an author I have read consistently for the last few years.
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