It's a little awkward when a book is recommended to you and you find yourself coming out of it with a bit of an eyeroll and more than a little exasperation.

Eddings has some wit and fun with his world, which is more than I can say for many fantasy authors who are so hell-bent on mimicking Tolkien that any sort of levity is a sin. Unfortunately, that's about where my positives for the book ends. I see a lot of reviews here which decry this work for having familiar Edding's tropes condensed into a predictable mess, and without even reading another of his works I can say that is probably the case. The villains are bland and portrayed as barely possessing two brain cells between them, making them all (with the exception of one undead dude) completely non-threatening to our heroes. There is never a sense of urgency in a plot which allows its heroes to time and space hop, deliver armies whenever needed, retrieve endless funds, etc. The attempts Eddings does have to create tension only barely succeed - Eliar being clubbed on the back of the head, for example, limits the groups space-hopping abilities for a bit, but the heroes' army is never put in any real state of duress. They continue to pretty easily hold off the idiotic assaults of the enemy, retreating to a conveniently placed mountain for no reason other than to really beat it into the villain's heads that they are absolutely as stupid as they act. In another scene, our heroes burn the crops ahead of the invading army in order to starve them out, and then have to deal with the consequences of that food shortage for the land they are trying to protect... until surprise! The neighboring country actually had a great harvest, and we'll just use some of that endless money to fill the graineries and ta-dah! No problems! The entire book is a sad hodge-podge of such instances back to back, making for slow pacing and episodic predictability. Something always goes a bit wrong, only to be corrected with no consequence because... plot? Oh, the enemies got a giant army in your city and you guys can't fend them off? Stab one guy and they all turn out to be an illusion that just poofs! Yikes, dude.

Beyond this, the characters were often left lackluster and confusing in their motivations. The seven main characters are reductive to the point of parody (Eliar likes food & soldiering, Gher is an original thinker and resident expositionist, Bheid has a sense of righteous justice and cannot for the life of him accept reality, etc.) This works passably with some like Andine, but makes the others fall horribly flat. Entire character arcs are introduced and then never resolved for growth. Althalus, our titular hero, doesn't really develop - he's still the same sneaky, okay-with-murdering, money-loving "rogue" from the beginning, only now he likes a cat-goddess. Okay. That's not really worthy of a title like The Redemption of Althalus, but surely that was just a misstep, right? A really big, glaring, giant-font mistake... oh dear. But the most egregious example being Bheid's despair after taking his first kill, in which he essentially mopes for a bit and is just told to get over it and does - showing no shift in perspective or lessons learned. They even set up a scene where he is going to officiate a wedding, where I thought perhaps Eddings would give him a moment in his speech where he addressed death and life and his newfound perspective in order to let us understand it - but they just cut right past the wedding altogether.

And the weddings... oh, the weddings. Everyone had to pair up, which is one of my least favorite things a novelist can do. Some, like Eliar and Andine, were admittedly alright; they're teenagers, so their romance made sense, but Bheid and Leitha are so tired as standalone characters that their pointless hook up was eyeroll-inducing. I don't know about his other works, but Eddings comes off here as profoundly misunderstanding romance, and women, really - I was especially turned off with his tendency to make women smugly doing figure 8's around their idiotic men, as if we as an audience are supposed to laugh along and say, "Oh, men!" Meanwhile the only female villain is singularly and repeatedly characterized only by how ugly she is - a line of insult that is not ever pointed toward our male antagonists. Gelta is ugly beyond all reason, because that's what makes women bad, I guess; they're all pimply and bulbous and stinky and just ugly ugly ugly, huh? And let's not talk about how often she is referred to as a bitch, cow, whore, and another host of expletives never raised to her male counterparts. Way to break down barriers, Eddings.

Lastly, the amount of exposition in this book actually killed me a little inside. Eddings needs like, three more editors to go through and tell him to cut stuff out. Remember that wedding scene with Bheid I mentioned earlier that could have been good for resolving an emotional arc but was instead skipped? Well, Eddings definitely felt that was too much to write about, and yet doesn't waste a second to tirelessly repeat verbatim exposition that we as readers have already been made aware of to other characters. This guy is the king of useless exposition; I cannot count the amount of times the characters lengthy explanations of the in-universe magic or their next move were completely hashed out to us as readers, only to be told to us again whenever a new character arrives and says "wait, so what are you guys doing?" It was quite literally exhausting. Gher explains the concepts of their space and time-hopping not once, not twice, but on eight separate occasions, each time being as lengthy and repetitive as the first. Eddings is also the worst offender of the "show, don't tell" rule that I've read in a long time; we are told Althalus is an awesome thief all the time, although we never see it; we are told Leitha is a jokester, although her "jokes" consist of two occasions where she makes Bheid a little uncomfortable and teases Althalus by awkwardly calling him "daddy" (a thing that is already cringy but even more so when put against her rape-backstory as context). We're told the evil god wants to rule the world or something, but we never quite get an idea of what it is he wants to do with it. There is so little ever shown that by the end of the book I was still left unsure as to exactly what the god's books were - did they house the respective god's power or essence? Would destroying them destroy the god? Did they each contain different magical powers? Who knows.

In short, everything about this was hopelessly contrived. This is the type of book where, if it weren't a laborous 800 pages, I would give to a creative writing class to read to learn how NOT to write a story. It really fails on that many fronts. What little possible potential the set-up for this story had was squandered by horrific pacing, endless repetitiveness, bad characterization, cringy depictions of women that bordered on misogynistic, fat-shaming, and a strange penchant for setting up religious straw-man through which Eddings seemed to angrily scream at the audience that religion was stupid and limited and anyone who believed in anything other than what was right in front of them is obviously being conned. I gotta rate this 1/5. I sort of feel super bad since a friend offered it to me as an example of the type of story he liked. We're... gonna have to have some words.