Empress (Godspeaker #1) by Karen Miller
Publication: Hachette Book Group/Orbit (April 2008), ebook / ISBN 9780316032049
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 
Find ebook @ Amazon, Fictionwise
First sentence: Despite its two burning lard-lamps the kitchen was dark, its air choked with the stink of rancid goat butter and spoiling goat-meat.
I got this during last month’s $1 Orbit sale, and then somehow forgot about it until last week. I started reading it and couldn’t stop, even though I had a paper to write for school. It’s seriously good!
Summary from Amazon:
In a family torn apart by poverty and violence, Hekat is no more than an unwanted mouth to feed, worth only a few coins from a passing slave trader.
But Hekat was not born to be a slave. For her, a different path has been chosen.
It is a path that will take her from stinking back alleys to the house of her God, from blood-drenched battlefields to the glittering palaces of Mijak.
This is the story of Hekat, precious and beautiful.
I wasn’t really expecting anything when I started reading, but honestly, the first chapter alone shocked me. It’s got rape, domestic abuse, child abuse, slavery, and many other messed-up things, and it gets worse as the book goes on. Religion plays a huge part, and it’s the kind of religion with blood sacrifices and self-flagellation and smitings, and while it hasn’t escalated into human sacrifices (that I remember, anyway), it does seem to be right on the edge of it. However, the book isn’t vulgar, which I appreciated, and the writing was so good that I felt compelled to keep reading even as I kept thinking “ew, ew, ew.”
It’s a long book, but it never really felt long to me until around…page 400? Or whatever the equivalent from my ebook to the paper book is. At that point, a lot of the dialogue and situations got repetitive, I started noticing some run-on sentences, and some of the new characters introduced were a little boring. Time wasn’t spent on them, or the events, as maybe it would have been spent earlier in the book, and I think the narrative started to fall apart a bit. I think that the next two books will make up for that, though, so I’m not really worried about it.
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Becky, you are a temptress! How do you keep coming up with these challenges that I can’t avoid joining?!
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