Thursday, November 12, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Lost Gods by Micah Yongo


Lost Gods is the first in an epic fantasy series by Micah Yongo. It was a book I'd wanted to read for a long time after I saw a couple of people on twitter praise it except for some odd reason, my libraries never had a copy despite it coming from a major publisher. Oddly enough, I wound up getting an advance copy of this book's sequel (which I didn't realize was a sequel due to how the book was marketed) Pale Kings a while back and reviewed it without having read this book.  And I actually enjoyed Pale Kings, although I couldn't help but wonder if I might've gone as far as loved it if I'd had the background from reading book 1.  

And Lost Gods apparently turned up at the NYPL, so I took it out, and what I found was...an interesting fantasy novel that just didn't quite fascinate me as much as I'd hoped.  There was a solid world setup here with a very solid main plot, but separate side plots that popped up from time to time really never felt like more than a distraction, and were rather hard to care about.  I vaguely recall the second book doing better in this regard, and I do feel the urge to reread the second book now, so it's still a solid series starter by any means, and I really do hope the trilogy is completed at some point in the future.

-----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Neythan is part of the latest Sharim of the Brotherhood of the Shedaim - along with his 4 fellows Arianna, Josef, Daneel, and Yannick - and is, after making his first kill, about to finally take the covenant and become full Brothers of the order.  Then he will be one of the assassins/secret warriors who do the biddings of the Sovereign in ensuring the Sovereignty's rule remains prosperous for all.  

But when Neythan is sent on his first mission, he is struck by betrayal - one of his brothers dead, and another on the run seemingly as the betrayer who killed him.  Neythan feels no choice but to go after her, but the journey will take him places - and to the attention of beings - that he never could have anticipated.  And these travels will force him to reconsider all he knows about the world...and the Brotherhood itself.....
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Lost Gods is an epic fantasy story that sometimes seems a bit confused as to what it wants to do, with a plot that follows a number of characters from third person perspectives, but spends a vast majority of its time on Neythan.  So we get point of view chapters from not just Neythan, but also Daneel, and Sidon (the young Sharif, or King of these lands), and a few one-of characters.  The result is that we have the main plot with Neythan, which does affect the other plots a bit, but also sideplots about Daneel's side adventures with his brother Josef (who never gets a POV chapter) and his doubts about the Brotherhood, and about the Sidon's struggles to come into himself as a ruler when all the adults around him still treat him as a child.  

But again, Neythan's plot is clearly the A-plot of all of these, and it works fairly well.  Neythan is still a boy really at heart - while he's trained as an assassin, he's too kind hearted and too contemplative to be really a thoughtless killer as others in his order are.  And so when confronted with betrayal and the murder of a comrade, his response is to run back to his superiors to continue on with his mission, but to chase after the culprit and to get answers.  And when confronted by truths that shake his worldview, well, as a naïve young man, he struggles, but his inherent goodness forces him to keep moving forward towards a truth and doesn't let him stubbornly hold to old ideas when they conflict with that.  This character again leads to the main plot working as he searches for a murderer and then a truth that the Brotherhood isn't quite what it seems.  

The rest of the major characters unfortunately don't get the time needed for development.  Most notable are the young Sharif Sidon, Neythan's fellow Sharim member Daneel, and the noblewoman Yasmin.  Yasmin's plot is the best of the three, with her being desperate to find out the truths behind her brother's death and the mysteries that her husband is keeping from her.  But while she herself is good, her plot feels often just too often neglected for everyone else's making it hard to care as much.   Daneel is a less naive form of Neythan who spends his time travelling all over with his brother Josef (his actual brother, not just "brother") wondering why Josef is so inflexible and whether he himself should be when it comes to his own orders.  But Daneel is used more often than not just to show how this world works (he observes a major event that bodes ill for the next book) and as a result, his major character development feels out of nowhere.  And Sidon's plot as the young ruler who is treated like a young child and not respected, in favor of his domineering mother, just doesn't get enough time to make the reader care about it all.

The book does just enough to make you interested in caring about where things are going next, but if I hadn't read Pale Kings already, I'm not sure I'd be that interested in doing so.  But now I do kind of want to reread Pale Kings to see how things appear with the foreknowledge, since I do think that book was a bit better, with that second book more balanced than this.  This book is fine, but well, with all the books out there these days, I kind of want more in a trilogy starter.  


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