Guðvarr is the entitled nephew of a Jarl Störr, a sniveling weasel who throws his limited power around to get what he wants and makes Orka’s life hell in the first book.
The resurrection of Lik-Rifa has an enormous ripple effect over The Hunger of the Gods that puts cracks in the status quo of Vigrið, The Battle Plane told at the very beginning of the series and foreshadowed it entirely breaking by its epilogue. Still, now it’s the character interactions and the overarching narrative that takes center stage. Gwynne continues what he set in the first novel with Scandanavian culture throughout his established world with well-researched accuracy. With the world firmly established, there is less need for set-up and more time to focus on the ongoing plot.
I compared the point-of-view character’s arcs in my review for The Shadow of the Gods, to a Venn diagram with a small amount of crossing plot thread in the center and it would be interesting how those plot threads would overlap in book two, but I failed to foresee how much larger the union of all sets in the center of the diagram would grow with the character’s goals, politics, and motivations interweaving. Orka, Varg, and Elvar return as points of view now with two added, Guðvarr, the stooge nephew of one of the jarls who went after Orka, and daughter Biórr, the dragon-born who betrayed the Battlegrim and killed their leader before helping free the dragon-god. The Hunger of the Gods, the follow-up to The Shadow of the Gods, picks up right where it left off with the dragon-god Lik-Rifa now set loose on the world, Varg finding out he has tainted blood along with all of the Bloodsworn, and Orka revealed to be a former member and her murdered husband brother to Glornir, their leader.
Whoever told the people of John Gwynne’s series The Bloodsworn Saga that the gods would stay fallen after the Guðfalla may have spoken too soon.
0 kommentar(er)
