Hannah Whitten interview with Hiba Tahir, 4 April 2024: 

I'm trying to be open-minded and hoping Hannah Whitten can salvage this story in book 3, but this trilogy seems to be turning into a checklist of tropes I generally hate, and so far I'm not buying what she's trying to sell me.

If anything, she seems to be trying to go for a subversion of the usual dualistic, symbiotic dynamic of characters with elemental powers - Apollius and Nyxara started as humans without any apparent special destiny, and then usurped the natural powers of Light and Darkness. The characters of the other gods aren't developed enough to say whether their elemental powers reflect their personalities, but she doesn't do the obvious thing and pair up the fire god with the water goddess, either. Basically the gods (and their modern counterparts) are people who have chanced into elemental powers, but not the elemental symbolism that usually accompanies such powers. I suppose that's a valid choice for a story where the theme is characters denying the destinies they've inherited from their previous incarnations, but that's just not a theme I'm personally interested in reading about.

The 21st-century-American style of the dialogue is even more obnoxious here than it was in the first book, because in the flashback sequences taking place hundreds of years ago, the gods still speak in the same register as the modern day characters.

Hannah Whitten: 

You don't say. The problem is not the foreshadowing; the problem is that every time something is foreshadowed, when the foreshadowed event occurs several hundred pages later, the text goes out of its way to make sure the reader notices that this was foreshadowed (which is to say, to make sure the reader notices how very clever and skilled the author is). Frequently Lore's inner monologue also tells us exactly how to interpret the words of other characters (for example, by taking note of when Bastian refers to Gabe by his surname instead of his first name), rather than just letting the dialogue speak for itself. I always take this sort of self-commentary inserted into the text as an indication that an author (or editor) is either insecure about the quality of the writing, or insulting the intelligence of their readers, and I find it's one of the most immersion-breaking thing an author can do.

In my review of book 1 I was very annoyed about how Lore and Bastian were very obvious Rey/Kylo analogues, which inevitably left me feeling mean-spirited towards Gabe. The addition of a love triangle is the only thing that could have made TRoS worse than it already was.

My feelings toward him have not improved, because this book is overly preoccupied with this love triangle situation (really more of a "lust" triangle because Lore's attraction to both men seems to be primarily physical) to the detriment of every other aspect of the plot and characters; neither the plot nor the characters develop enough to justify this many pages of nothing interesting happening. The one minor character who is the most elaborated upon is, of course, the one who dies.

Lore and Gabe barely interact for the first half of the book, but Lore expends a lot of words whining about how it's just so unfair that she has to marry Bastian for the sake of appearances when she wants to be with both men, a complaint which comes off as supremely selfish in a pseudo-historical setting where both of the other most prominent female characters are pushed into unwanted arranged marriages. Supposedly Bastian and Gabe are yearning for each other, although this might only be in Lore's imagination because they hardly ever so much as occupy the same physical space. In general I came away with the distinct impression of double standards of the unironic girlboss/"women's wrongs" variety. This whole polyamory shitshow got started when,

hundreds of years ago when the gods were still mortals, Nyxara cheated on Apollius with one of their friends while he was away on a journey. Near the end when Lore is planning to make her escape from the palace, she has unplanned sex with Bastian because she can't control her lust, and then she chloroforms him unconscious.

Can you just imagine a male love interest doing that to a female character?

Those elements of the plot which have the potential to be interesting are always relegated to the background - although there are several flashbacks and dream sequences of the previous age when the gods were mortal, we learn nothing about what the setting was like in this ancient era; the raison d'etre of the Kirythean Empire is to unite the known world in anticipation of the return of Apollius, and the current Emperor unexpectedly seems to be a man of genuine faith who is willing to hand control of the Empire over to the reincarnated god, but also isn't a complete villain; as a devout monk (thanks to Lore's obsession with sex in the midst of all these assassinations, terrorist attacks and imminent wars that are going on, we are repeatedly told that Gabe is the only one of the monks who actually abides by his vows of celibacy), Gabe should be having an all-consuming crisis of faith, but his feelings about the return of the gods are only mentioned in a couple of chapters and not from his POV. As is typical with these types of stories about evil fantasy-Christianity, by having the protagonist be someone who never had any faith in the god(s) in the first place, Whitten has given herself an easy escape from needing to write the type of thorough, meaningful, applicable introspection that you would expect from a novel about religious trauma, such as the POV character working through their emotional response to the betrayal of the god(s) and the realisation that the beliefs that have shaped their life were founded upon lies perpetuated by the people they trusted most. The question of whether the good that has come from the institution of the religion (e.g. political stability, education, sublime art) outweighs the bad doesn't arise because Lore has only negative opinions and experiences of religion and religious people. She also doesn't have to make a choice about whether to cut herself off from friends and family and suffer from the resulting guilt and isolation, because by happy coincidence all her friends share her predicament of being possessed by divine powers, and are all immediately willing to disavow the supreme god as evil and flee the country with her (even the monks!). 

I'm not even sure what I want from book 3, but I'm certainly not rooting for Lore, Gabe and Bastian to live happily ever after as a throuple because at this point in the story I don't really like any of them as individuals, let alone in combination.