One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother was shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something many strangers. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it.
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About the Book
No Gods, No Monsters
The Convergence Saga Book One
by Cadwell Turnbull
Published 7 September 2021
Blackstone Publishing
Genre: Urban Fantasy, LGBTQIA+
Page Count: 387
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One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother was shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it.
As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend’s trail of bread crumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters.
At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark?
The world will soon find out.
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My Review
My Rating: 3 Stars
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I was lucky enough to get both eARC and Audio ARC access to No Gods, No Monsters via NetGalley and I want to thank whoever approved both! I really love having the option to experience a book both ways. I’m writing one cohesive review through Goodreads and will be submitting to the different NetGalley listings from here, so please forgive the audiobook component in the ebook/print book listing.
Monsters have always walked among us, and sometimes we get to peek behind the veil and see the truth. No Gods, No Monsters opens with a young woman named Laina getting bad news about her brother’s untimely death, and jumps off from there revealing monsters left, right, and centre entangled in different lives and communities. It’s weird, it’s exciting, it’s full of mystery, and I’m not sure what I think of it now that I’ve come out the other end. I don’t think I get it?
I’m not sure if this was meant to be a cohesive plot or several disjointed stories, but it felt disjointed, and I kept wondering if I’d drifted off and missed something big. I think this is probably the sort of book that needs to be read slowly and carefully, not set to up for audio playback as the listener knocks out mundane tasks. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the chaotic mystery of this book and I do think it’ll definitely find a strong cult following.
In terms of the audiobook recording, this is not the best. All of my audiobook apps are defaulted to 2x playbacks speed, and some books seem slow to me at that, but this one tempted me to slow it down. That means the narration is quite fast-paced and may be too fast for readers who don’t normally speed up their audiobooks. On top of that, sometimes when a character other than the POV character was speaking, the narrator adopted a voice that was somewhere between Yoda and Kermit the Frog, and it was… distracting.
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Want to read a review of something I recently called a solid 5 stars? Check out Jati’s Wager by Jonathan Nevair.
Great review!