Read By Kyle 's Reviews > The Fury of the Gods

I think this is the swan song for my time with John Gwynne's books. For context, Shadow of the Gods was the first ever ARC I requested and started my thinking of reviews in a more critical manner. It was my #4 best book of 2021. Hunger of the Gods I felt was a bit bloated and repetitive, but still mostly really liked it. Then I read Faithful and the Fallen and was mostly confused why people love that series so much. Which made me nervous to read Fury of the Gods. Had I changed, or had I grown weary of Gwynne's books, or would I still love it?

Elements of all three, I think. My tolerance for books with constant fighting has changed. And this book has a LOT of fighting. It got to the point where whenever a faceoff would happen, my eyes would glaze over until they got to the outcome. Hack, slash, insult, parry, slash, dodge, hack, insult. How many times can a book do that? A lot, it turns out.

But I also just think beyond my changing feelings on empty fight scenes, my desire to love this due to the previous ones and also because of liking Gwynne as an author and how hard it was for him to finish, I just...don't think the book is very good.

I gave Wrath, the ending of FATF, two stars, but that was moreso because of my burnout with the series. Wrath was an epic conclusion, with many scenes that I still remember, it had lots of fight scenes but several of them made me feel things or were shocking. Maybe in retrospect it should be three stars. Fury of the Gods is a bunch of angry people being very angry at the person they're angry at, and telling everyone how they can't wait to get revenge, and then those people bump into each other, and extremely predictable things happen. There's also a narrative similarity to the beginning of Wrath that I hated there and I hate here, too.

There's a POV character named Gudvarr that I think is terrible. Some people love this POV but I truly find him awfully written. His inner monologue is inspired by Glokta but it always reminds me of like a cartoon villain in some Disney movie about princesses where they have to make sure the audience understands the evil motivations of the evil character so they just say obvious evil things out loud (except these are in his head). I can't think of examples but most of his thoughts fall into this category for me. Drags down my whole reading experience unfortunately.

The climax of Fury is rote. Every chapter of the climax seemingly ends with two characters finding each other in battle, swearing up and down about how terrible the other is, and then one of them dying. Over and over again. Yet, I will say that my attachment to these characters is higher than in FATF, so when some of them were put in peril, I cared. There are also a couple really good action scenes, and giant dragons, wolves, and snakes fighting is cool. So there were some positives.

I'm sad that this book didn't work for me like I hoped, but I am aware it's closing a chapter of my reading taste and I will probably refrain from reading too much else like it going forward.