The big concept here is great. Ancient Gods are alive and in the world. Not hidden and closeted, but out and proud,
with diplomatic missions and dedicated bands of followers. Teenager Kyra Locke discovers that her family
is much more involved with these gods and their relics than she had ever
thought. Now she has to recover a
stolen relic in order to rescue her dad and oh yeah, save the world while she’s
at it.
Sounds fun, right?
Unfortunately it just didn’t work for me. Initially I was put off by the sheer amount
of infodumps early in the novel. I know
that some tricky world building has to occur in order for the reader to be able
to process what is going on in this world.
There are lots of differences with our world, some large some small, but
all have to be set up for the story to work properly. I think that Bond took the easy way out here,
just laying out facts. That meant that
despite fairly quick pacing of the plot itself, there are many pages where we
are learning the facts of this world and not engaging with the plot or the
characters.
The second major problem I had was with the characters
themselves. I just didn’t care. It’s not that there were problematic elements
to any of them. They simply failed to
engage me. Woken Gods centers on Kyra, who is a typical teenage girl. She fancies herself as being rebellious, but
really just does so in safe middle class ways.
Ramones shirts, acting cool. She’s
basically a good kid. She recognizes her
responsibilities to her dad, and wants to help him even when she’s repeatedly
told to let it go. So she’s a good
person. But I just didn’t care. While intellectually I could sympathize with
her, I didn’t have any sort of emotional connection to make me care about what
happens to Kyra, her family, or her world.
It seems that this book is already getting a very positive
response from the YA audience, so clearly lots of people are responding to
it. While Bond shows great imagination
in the creation of this universe, I think that it fails in execution.
