Read not well by Claudia Alick. I could not get with her reading style or voice at all, and it sure didn't help that the writing was atrocious: confused, jarring, choppy, and with events and the mechanics of this fictional world very poorly explained.
I was attracted by the PoC on the cover of the book since usually the folks in stories of this nature are white, but once again I proved to myself what an appalling mistake it is to pay any attention to a book cover. The woman inside the book could have been anyone - white, black, tall, short, long-haired, short haired, bald, fat, thin or anywhere in between any of those options for all the description we got. Her appearance is never mentioned - at least not in the portion of this that I could stand to listen to. I'm not one for detailed depictions of every single aspect of a fictional world, but a bit of hinting here and there is nice!
Ideally, it ought to be utterly irrelevant what the character looks like or what color he, she, or they are, unless of course it has some bearing on the story, but realistically, you would expect there to be some sort of mention at some point of her skin color, or hair or something, even if only in passing, but there was nothing - not in the portion I read. It was like she was a blank slate. Since the author is white I can only assume this is a cynical attempt to claim some relevancy in the current climate. Or maybe he wrote this story about a white character and the publisher just slapped a woman of color on the front since he doesn't mention who she is. Maybe the Chinese edition has a Chinese protagonist, and the Latin edition a Hispanic one. I dunno.
The story is that Tara, the main charcter, has graduated from her supernatural academy, but she left dishonorably somehow, so how that worked, I do not know. She's a complete newbie with no experience whatsoever, so why she's chosen to resurrect the deceased fire god of Alt Coulumb is a mystery. The deal here is that people worship gods, which gives the god power, and the god in turn uses that power to care for their worshippers. It's a bit incestuous and weird, but it's really not explained too well, and you have to wonder what's the point, really!
Tara and her supervisor discover that the god, Kos, has been murdered. For me this is where the very idea of the story gets boring because they have to take it to court! I was concerned about the story becoming mired like that, but I was willing to give this audiobook a chance until I began listening. It failed me fairly quickly, so I ditched it and moved onto something hopefully better. Life's far too short to force oneself to read a crappy novel to the end.
