The final battle has arrived for the Bloodsworn, the Battle-Grim, and the gods of Vigrið, the Norse-inspired fantasy world of John Gwynne's latest series The Bloodsworn. The Bloodsworn has been an epic ride so far, from its intriguing first book The Shadow of the Gods to the escalating stakes and betrayals of its second, The Hunger of the Gods. Now, with The Fury of the Gods, Gwynne caps off the series and gives fitting endings to memorable characters like Orka, Elvar, and Varg.
Since this is the final book in The Bloodsworn trilogy, there will be full spoilers for books 1 and 2 below. We'll keep the spoilers light for The Fury of the Gods itself, but there's no real way to talk about this novel without getting into some of the details. So if you're current on The Bloodsworn, read on. If not, consider checking out my review for The Shadow of the Gods to get an idea of what you're getting into with this epic book series.
Book review: The Fury of the Gods by John Gwynne (The Bloodsworn #3)
Things were looking pretty grim for our favorite drengrs when we last saw them in The Hunger of the Gods. Elvar had just staged a bloody coup, killing her own father and brother in order to assume leadership as the Jarl of Snakavik, with the thralled wolf-god Ulfrir at her side. Varg and his Bloodsworn companions had finally freed the Seiðr-witch Vol, who was kidnapped and taken across the sea to the foreign land of Iskidan — and accidentally liberated a bunch of captive Tainted there, the bastard children of the foreign land's emperor. And Orka Skullsplitter was bitten by a swarm of frost spiders, seemingly killed or captured after finally rescuing her son Breca from the clutches of Lik-Rifa's dragon-born warriors. Oh, and let's not forget conniving Guðvarr, who helped Like-Rifa pull a fast one on the assembled leadership of Darl, tricking them into resurrecting the eagle god Orna just so that she could butcher her while she was still weak.
The Hunger of the Gods had a hell of a conclusion, which gives the third and final book an excellent jumping off point. Gwynne makes the most of it, throwing us right in the deep end in this final battle for Vigrið. The Bloodsworn has always been a series that has excellent characters and sweeping battles, and The Fury of the Gods is no exception. We're at the end of the road, and the battles come fast and furious right up until the book's pulse-pounding ending.
On the whole, that makes for an exciting read that's very hard to put down. But what would great battles be if we didn't care about the characters involved in them? Gwynne has done an admirable job of making the cast of The Bloodsworn feel like real people, and for as good as the action was in The Fury of the Gods, the thing I enjoyed even more were the quiet moments where we got to spend time with everyone before things got really bad.
The Fury of the Gods also has a lot of work to do in paying off long-standing plot threads. Characters who have evaded justice for the entire series are finally given their just desserts, while others who've long searched for vengeance finally get their shot at it. Many of these payoffs have been foreshadowed for quite a while, but there are also a few genuine shockers in this book. Since this is the final novel in the series, a Norse-inspired fantasy drawing on legends of Ragnarök, it should come as no surprise that the body count is high. It's an emotional ride, and many characters fans have grown to love (or hate) over the course of the series don't make it out alive.
Since I mentioned the myths that inspired The Fury of the Gods, I also need to shout out the massively epic nature of the conflict here. In the first book, gods were still the stuff of saga-tales in Vigrið; in the second, they were beginning to return and exert their influence across the land. The Fury of the Gods moves full bore ahead with the war between gods, giving characters like Ulfrir, Lik-Rifa, and Rotta the Rat ample time to shine. There is one other god whose identity you can probably guess from the cover of this novel who makes an extremely memorable appearance as well. I was hoping for a little bit more out of that one in particular, but the shocking twists and turns surrounding their appearance still made for one of the most memorable parts of the book.
The Fury of the Gods ending left me wanting a bit more
I had two real qualms with The Fury of the Gods. The first is that, since this is the final book and it has lots of action, at times the sheer amount of combat reached a point where it started to become a dull roar. Perhaps that's fitting — after all, the chaos of the shield-wall is ever-present in Vigrið — but it started to make me want to tune it out a little by the end. That's a shame, because Gwynne writes excellent battle scenes. But with around half the book or more dedicated to that type of action, it lost a bit of its spark for me compared to previous novels, where the space between fights and an added variety of situations allowed them to pop a little bit more.
My other qualm has to do with the payoffs. While many were thrilling, by the end of the novel it felt a little like everyone had a blood feud and Gwynne went through knocking them out one at a time in a way that felt almost a little too neat. There's one portion near the very end where four of those blood feuds resolve in four back-to-back chapters, which undercut the power of most of them. Some of those chapters even end with minuscule variations on the exact same sentence. Considering that all were plot threads which Gwynne had been weaving since the very first book of the series, I thought that was a little underwhelming, especially compared to one shocker death in particular which occurred earlier in the book.
Ultimately, The Fury of the Gods still manages to bring The Bloodsworn to a fitting conclusion, leaving off in a way that left me wondering if we'd ever see more stories set in this Norse fantasy world. I hope so. I enjoyed this series immensely, and any issues I had with its ending are far overshadowed by the journey to get there. So while I think The Hunger of the Gods may still be may favorite in the series, it's still an absolute no-brainer to recommend The Fury of the Gods for any fan of Gwynne's work. The Bloodsworn is one of my favorite series in recent years, and it's both sad and cathartic to know characters like Orka Skullsplitter and Varg have reached the end of their saga-tale.
Verdict
The Fury of the Gods is a resounding ending to The Bloodsworn, and while it has a few minor stumbles, it remains an exceptional fantasy book that finishes out an even more exceptional series. This was my first foray into John Gwynne's books, and it's a testament to how good they were that I'll absolutely be picking up one of his other series like The Faithful and the Fallen or Of Blood and Bone once I'm finished digesting The Bloodsworn.
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