Review: Strange Gods

4/5

For fans of: traveling to different worlds, coming of age, troubled teens go on an adventure, alien worlds, sci-fi based mythology

Synopsis: Troubled teen, “Spooky” Laurel, thought she was going to be spending her summer before senior year in a wilderness camp to make amends with her family and hopefully get it together before going to college. For Spooky, she just wants to be left alone and blend quietly in the background. Fate had other plans, mainly in the form of very strange gods, tricky deals, traveling to alien worlds, and the fate of Earth in the balance.

Review: I was given an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. I’m not sure what I thought I was getting into when I received this book. It gave me some Percy Jackson-ish vibes on the outside, but that was kiboshed real quick with genre-twists into worlds that are a mix of sci-fi and fantasy. From the get-go, I love the MC. Spooky is very relatable is the girl who is just trying her best and made a mistake that landed her in a bad spot. I feel for kids like her and others that we meet along the way. The outcasts who don’t fit into society, the ones who do fit in but made decisions that don’t match their image, and the free spirits who just want to experience the world before it’s all gone. The gods took a while for me to get used to. Alison Kimble created a universe where gods seem to be more sci-fi based, but also with magical powers. It took some time to wrap my mind around their descriptions and make sense of their characters, they are just not something I have come across before. Overall, the plot was well-paced traveling different worlds in a race against time as gods from other worlds realize Earth may have been abandoned by its god. One thing I would have liked to see more was the POV of Carcass, the main god Spooky deals with. The majority of the time, I was suspicious of his motivations or if he was even telling the truth at all. The threats to Earth are not as evident to the reader or even to Spooky, as she takes Carcass’s word for it. Hopefully, we get more of his POV in the next installment. Fair warning, it ends in quite the cliffhanger and I can’t wait to see what happens next!