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MY ⭐️ RATING: 4.5/5
Format: Kindle Whispersync
BOOK DESCRIPTION
At the heart of every legend lies a truth.
Twisted and reshaped by the currents of time.
For twenty years, strategos Dexios has led the phalanx of Thena against its enemies, pulled from one battleground to another in a relentless cycle of war and bloodshed. Now, finally, he has found the courage to leave that life behind. To relinquish his officer’s sword and return to the verdant slopes of his vineyard with his wife and son.
Peace, however, is fragile and capricious. When Thena’s northern allies bring word of an enormous tauran horde gathering on their borders, Dexios has no choice but to answer the call to arms one last time.
As humans and tauros collide, another evil wakes. Whispered rumours of a clawed creature that stalks the shadowy streets. Of violent murders committed in the name of deities long thought vanquished. To speak their names is heresy.
They are the Exiled. The Banished.
The Ruined Gods.
MY REVIEW
I was very excited to return to the Ruined Gods world that Robins has created, and he knocked Metanoia out of the park as a phenomenal sequel to Panacea. What makes this installment so magical is how real the world feels. The authenticity of the bronze-age culture and the weight of the conflict made me feel like I was there in Thena and the Citrine Wastes with all these characters. And of course, the gorgeous cover art by Felix Ortiz was screaming at me to hurry up and read it. I mean, just look at that cover!
The pacing of the story was a perfect blend of fast, medium and slow when it needed to be. Tense confrontations and revelations land with real impact, while giving the quieter more surreal scenes the space to breathe just as much as the action-packed sequences. As Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” A new war of the gods between the male and female pantheons looms while the gods play their games with mortals, all while another immortal bides their time. This deliberate flow makes the looming conflict feel both inevitable and deeply personal.
It’s funny, one of the things I pointed out in my review of Panacea was Forrester’s choice of narrative voice that I wasn’t a big fan of at first. That was something I didn’t even have an issue with in Metanoia. I enjoyed Jay Forrester’s narration quite a bit, it’s the way he puts himself into the story. I could feel the emotions of the characters, whether it was happiness, anger or jealousy, it made the immersion into the world seamless.
“We cannot escape our fate, no matter how hard we try. We can run from it, hide from it, dismiss it as pure fantasy… the end result is the same.”
Robins continues to masterfully use the multiple third-person limited points of view to tell the story through Dexios, Keres, Elena and Makar, supported by fantastic side characters that are just as loveable as the main characters. He creates such likeable characters that you are excited to jump into every chapter without being bummed when the POV changes. Dexios and Nambe’s friendship is one of my favorites from Panacea, and it continues to thrive here because they are the perfect contrast to one another. However, it’s Dexios’s relationship with his wife, Melia, that really shows his growth as a person that makes you feel for him even more.
I also loved seeing Keres get his time to shine while he traverses through the Citrine Wastes with his fallen comrades as he’s led by Zeus to exact his revenge on Hera and retake Mount Olympus. Zeus’s attempts at manipulating Keres made each scene more tense than the next. Meanwhile, Makar and Elena split perspectives as they travel together through Tartarus to retake the throne of the dead god, Hades. We get to see Makar dealing with the legacy of his father and what he must do while Elena works to discover more truths. Robins even throws in some added twists to the mix of this story that had me in shock and another one that I pretty much saw coming. But it was nice to see nonetheless.
So if you’re a fan of Greek mythology or just historical fantasy this story is for you. Robins raises the stakes so high in this sequel that it leaves you desperate to see how the trilogy will finally conclude. As Robins has said, it’s Clash of the Titans meets 300 with a heavy dose of Greek mythology, and he couldn’t be more right. How does that not get your blood pumping?
Wolfmantula.com 