Book Review: What Monstrous Gods

What Monstrous Gods by Rosamund Hodge (Balzer & Bray, 2024).

What Monstrous Gods is a roller coaster of a book, full of unexpected twists and turns that come at you at breakneck speed.

The irony is, it’s based on “Sleeping Beauty,” that most sedentary of fairy tales. But only very loosely based. Think of “Sleeping Beauty” if, instead of a kiss, breaking the curse required a killing. And if, after the killing, everything started going wrong.

Rosamund Hodge places this incident near the beginning of her novel, sending her heroine, Lia, into the briars around the enchanted castle almost before we know where we are. Lia’s mission is to free the royal family of her land, who have been under a sleeping spell for 500 years. And the only way she can do that is to kill Ruven, the sorcerer who cast the spell.

Lia is young, but she’s spent her life—raised as an orphan in a convent—training for this task. The nuns who raised her are worshipers of the old gods of their land, who went silent when the royal family were put to sleep, and are now almost forgotten. But the nuns are determined to bring the gods back, and to do that meant training Lia to kill.

Which she does. For a triumphant moment, everything goes to plan. Ruven the sorcerer is dead, the royal family awakes, the power of the gods is returning. But then the dead Ruven starts haunting her.

And then things really get out of hand.

With deft assuredness, Hodge spins one of those edge-of-your-seat tales that you can’t stop sneaking peeks at, even when you’re supposed to be doing something else. Her plot and her characters keep revealing surprising developments and complications, heading off in a new direction just as you thought you were getting used to the old one.

No one is more shocked by it all than Lia herself—at a darkness in her beloved gods that she either glossed over or never knew about, at the strange sympathy she now feels with the cynical boy sorcerer whom she killed, at things she finds herself doing that she always considered traitorous, or worse.

More and more, as she works with the royal family to bring back the blessings of the gods, Lia feels torn over the faith she cherishes. She has always longed to heal people and preserve life, but as Ruven’s ghost won’t stop pointing out to her, the gods don’t seem to share her priorities.

The faith that Ruven belongs to—a faith Lia has always thought heretical—preaches a god who loves his people enough to die for them. Lia thought that her gods were loving too, but what if they’re not? What if they don’t love her, or anyone else? How can the gods make things better for her people if she suddenly finds herself compelled to thwart them at every turn?

If everything she believed so fervently is a lie, how can she reconcile that with the good that she wants to do?

Hodge possesses a rare gift for tackling thorny moral and theological questions in lean, racing prose. Between the ethical dilemmas, the complex characters, the convoluted plot, and the constant suspense, What Monstrous Gods is a wild ride—the kind that’s so thrilling that you can hardly bear to get off at the end.

What Monstrous Gods releases March 5; you can pre-order it at the links below.

(Cover image copyright Balzer + Bray. Thanks to the author for the advance review copy.)

Book Links:

What Monstrous Gods on Amazon
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Goodreads Links:

My Fair Lord by Elisabeth Hobbes

Other Links:

In Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal, I have a review of C. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935-1947 by Mark Noll.