Genre: Myth and legend
Description:
The author says this book “combines mythology
with science fiction and slipstream fantasy in a strange and introspective
way.”
This is the first book in a tetralogy. Susana
Imaginário wrote all four as a single 300,000+ word novel, then took pity on
readers and cut the result up into more manageable chunks. She has set two
major, ancient pantheons against each other: the Aesir (Norse) and the
Olympians (Greek) now in competition for worlds and worshippers after The Merge.
The Aesir and the Olympians seem to know
surprisingly little about other religions, including the Egyptian pantheon. Kali
is mentioned. A stray Egyptian goddess turns up, who nobody apparently recognises.
Buddhism and the Abrahamic religions do not feature.
There are suggestions that the two pantheons
need to co-operate to avoid being subsumed by Chronos, the primal god of Time. This
they find difficult. Gaea, the ancient mother goddess of all life, has got
herself into a bit of a pickle with Chronos. She has been playing politics and
things have gotten somewhat out of hand: the Underworld has gone missing.
The central character is Psyche, a human
elevated to become the goddess of the soul. However, she has transgressed
against the gods, been cursed, and imprisoned (as a wyrd god) inside the mind
of a dryad called Ileanna.
Author:
Susana Imaginário describes herself as “a misfit from Portugal”.
She says of her tetralogy, “what started as an exercise to improve my English
ended in the realisation of a twenty-year-old dream.”
She moved to England to pursue a career as an aerialist and
now runs a Tabletop Gaming retreat in Ireland with her husband. Her hobbies
include reading, playing board games, hanging upside down, poking around
ancient ruins, talking to trees and being tired. She loves a good story, and
claims not to talk much.
Appraisal:
This is a complex book. This first volume is
just the tip of its iceberg. The action gallops along in short chapters. These
are from a variety of different viewpoints: the Wyrd, Psyche/Ileana; Gaea;
Chronos; Ideth, another dryad who Chiron the centaur calls ‘unbridled one’ for
reasons still unclear to me; Chiron himself; another confined Wyrd God who is
actually Odin; Loki, freshly broken out of Hades’ (now missing) realm; Hel
(Loki’s daughter); a ‘Dharkan’ (a sexy, icy assassin); the Egyptian goddess of
writing, Seshat; Iosh, a k a Judoc, a local lothario cum priest; and a human
queen, Arianh. There may be a couple of others I’ve forgotten. It is a LOT of
narrators. As the jump into a new narrator at the beginning of the chapter isn’t
signposted for the reader, it means a couple of paragraphs of floundering
before one establishes whose head we are in now. The author could have been
kinder to her readers in this regard.
If you enjoy the sort of complex use of
characters, pantheons and world building such as you encounter in Tolkien and
George RR Martin, then although there is a bagginess about this first book, you
will like it a lot, providing you can keep who is doing what to whom straight
in your head. The beings to whom we are introduced in this first volume are
very entertaining. The tone is witty and light. And the Dharkan is very sexy
indeed.
No huge amount of progress towards whatever
the over-arching goal of the four books is has been achieved by the end of this
first one. Imaginário asks, in her author’s note, for patience from her readers
and promises everything will make sense in the end.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
FYI:
Some (mainly light-hearted) F-bombs
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating: ****
Four Stars
Reviewed
by: Judi Moore
Approximate word count: 95-100,000 words
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