Summoning and Sacrifice
Series: Liturgy of Worlds, #1
Author: Nathan Hartle
Genre: Fantasy
Book Description:
A hunted woman. A missing god. The adventure of a lifetime.
All that Shada desires is peace and freedom. What she has is fear and hunger. She’s a servant on the run from her cruel master, who is determined to lock her away.
Then comes a chance at a new life. Alone in the vast, cruel city of Ronia, she meets the Lady. This enigmatic spirit makes her an offer: Shada can accept her dismal lot… or undertake a quest to find Ronia’s vanished god.
For the gods disappeared without a trace in the long-ago age of legend, leaving the worlds of humans to chaos and war. Without its god, Ronia’s once-mighty empire is crumbling toward an abyss.
To save their people, Shada and her ragtag companions will journey to the ends of the universe. But first, they must escape Ronia alive.
Many in this city of blades, poison, and shadow mean to stop them at all costs. If they fail, slavery or death await them… and their world will fall into darkness.
Summoning and Sacrifice is the opening book of the Liturgy of Worlds epic fantasy series.
Review:
The prologue of this book fascinated me. I enjoy stories that deal with gods and spirituality, and the combination of the writing and the premise – a trapped goddess who has faith she’ll reunite with her people, an ancient guardian who keeps her trapped with perhaps even older tech – sounded like something with a lot of potential.
The kind of thing I could love, or hate.
My impression after reading Summoning and Sacrifice is that I still don’t know where it’s going, and whether I’ll love it or hate it when all’s said and done. When I got to the last page, it felt like a story barely begun.
The story moves quickly, rushing along, with few breaks in the action, and presents a variety of characters. They have complex backstories and motivations that would have been interesting to explore, but I found that that to varying degrees they all remained at a distance to me through the entire story, due I think to the combination of how many perspective characters there were, and just as importantly to the fact that there were not enough quiet moments of reflection to get to know them, especially given the combination of their complex histories and the momentous changes in their lives occurring in the book itself. I did not have enough time with any of them to get to know them.
The story invites the “people create the gods with their belief in them” theme, which I have a complicated relationship with – though it has the potential to be quite interesting, depending on how it’s done – but at the same time, it’s revealed throughout the book that a lot of the people’s religious beliefs are wrong, and most of the religious leaders are corrupt. That leaves the reader knowing very little about what’s actually going on in the story, and even less about where it’s going, and I don’t know whether to be annoyed or interested.
A number of the characters have what I would consider to be grimdark backstories, and appear to be in a rather grimdark place themselves at the moment, afflicted by such things as stockholme’s syndrome, and forced into situations they want no part of because they’re afraid of other characters – while other main characters use the fear. A number of them serve in the temple of the Goddess herself, and labyrinthine politics confuse matters within the temple, as some officials believe and are corrupt, and some officials don’t believe at all, and perhaps a few believe and aren’t corrupt.
Beyond the implication (so far) that this does not mean the Goddess isn’t real and spirituality is complete bunk, I have little idea where this is going. The grimdark uncertainty element to the book makes it impossible for me to guess whether it’s leaning into obedience to the Temple, even though it’s corrupt, or whether that’s something that many of the characters are getting wrong ….
It felt to me like one of those things where nothing is definite, so that no matter what your leanings and preferences are you can see what you want to in the story, or maybe it’s more one of those that keeps you in constant suspense wondering if it’s going to take the direction you’d love or the one you fear. Either way, there were times it really had that feel to me, instead of the impression that it was working up to a real idea, developing and exploring someone’s thoughts for their own sake.
But, all together, it feels too early and too undeveloped to know, like I started reading a book and didn’t even get half-way through. Or maybe even less than that. Frankly, given the complexity of the many character’s histories and relationships alone, let alone the layers of complex political intrigue with multiple groups intriguing against each other in different ways and double agents … this feels like a story that could have a lot of potential, but I really think it needs to be at least twice as long.
Enthralled By Love 