The Woken Gods

The world after The Awakening is living in a reluctant truce between mankind and the gods. The gods must follow the rules of mysterious Society of the Sun or face execution. Once they knew they were no longer immortal, the rules changed. Kyra Locke is living with her father in the transformed city of Washington DC, accepting of the divine presence around her but more concerned with the current status of her relationship with Tam. That’s until two trickster gods corner her on the way back from school…

I’m a sucker for a story about gods and I wasn’t disappointed with The Woken Gods. The world-building is fantastic, and it completely makes sense that the gods would have set up shop in Washington DC. The lines of good guys and bad guys are blurred, with both the Society and the gods have differing motivations. It’s not a black and white world.

I liked how it wasn’t restriction to one culture’s mythology, although very Egyptian in flavour, it mentions that gods from Norse and Sumerian also came over during The Awakening. It also doesn’t feature the obvious gods that we all know about, which helps to remove preconceptions about how you think they should act. I did know about Set (or Seth) thanks to Stargate, which I feel had some influence on this world, although these gods aren’t aliens.

Any romance element is in the background to the important stuff. Kyra is a teenage girl and does have eyes, so you can forgive her a few pages of boy stuff, but I never felt it was the focus or got in the way. She was much more focused on her dad that impressing Oz. Like many of Strange Chemistry’s titles, it portrays the parents as lifelike people who are more than just constraints on kids’ lives or absent figures. It’s important that grown-ups aren’t always the bad guys.

The big concept here is great. Ancient Gods are alive and in the world. Not hidden and closeted, but out and proud, with diplomatic missions and dedicated bands of followers. Teenager Kyra Locke discovers that her family is much more involved with these gods and their relics than she had ever thought. Now she has to recover a stolen relic in order to rescue her dad and oh yeah, save the world while she’s at it.

Sounds fun, right? Unfortunately it just didn’t work for me. Initially I was put off by the sheer amount of infodumps early in the novel. I know that some tricky world building has to occur in order for the reader to be able to process what is going on in this world. There are lots of differences with our world, some large some small, but all have to be set up for the story to work properly. I think that Bond took the easy way out here, just laying out facts. That meant that despite fairly quick pacing of the plot itself, there are many pages where we are learning the facts of this world and not engaging with the plot or the characters.

The second major problem I had was with the characters themselves. I just didn’t care. It’s not that there were problematic elements to any of them. They simply failed to engage me. Woken Gods centers on Kyra, who is a typical teenage girl. She fancies herself as being rebellious, but really just does so in safe middle class ways. Ramones shirts, acting cool. She’s basically a good kid. She recognizes her responsibilities to her dad, and wants to help him even when she’s repeatedly told to let it go. So she’s a good person. But I just didn’t care. While intellectually I could sympathize with her, I didn’t have any sort of emotional connection to make me care about what happens to Kyra, her family, or her world.

It seems that this book is already getting a very positive response from the YA audience, so clearly lots of people are responding to it. While Bond shows great imagination in the creation of this universe, I think that it fails in execution.

Gwenda Bond weaves us a tale where the Gods of mythology have woken and now walk the present world. Because of this, the world and countries we live in have been transformed. A Secret Society that pretty much collects the artifacts belonging to the Gods (and maybe use these artifacts to keep the Gods in check). As for the Trickster Gods themselves, they act as if humanity were nothing more than pawns to be played upon the chess board.

I really liked the premise of this novel. I have never come across something unique as this one. I always wondered what a world would be liked if the Gods of all Mythology had awoken.

I liked Kyra. She might be a little rough around the edges at times but she does go beyond means to find her father. It does show she loves him even if she does have her rebellious streak but then what kid doesn't go through that.

The only downside to this was her friends. I found them to be very flat and devoid of any character whatsoever.

Overall, I loved this novel. I found it fun and I really enjoyed the ending immensely.