Andrea Stewart’s The Gods Below is the start to her new Hollow Covenant trilogy, which follows two sisters in the aftermath of a war between gods. The sisters are not gods—they are ordinary people, forced to flee their home before the prevailing god could change it, and them, into something unrecognizable. While Hakara, the oldest, makes it into a neighboring kingdom, Rasha, the youngest, gets separated from Hakara before she can join her. Years later, Hakara still wants to rescue her sister and, in the hopes of doing so, she joins a group that seeks to stop the god Kluehnn from transforming the world, while Rasha, transformed, has joined the god’s cult of worshippers.
Now, I count Andrea Stewart’s previous series, The Drowning Empire, as one of my favorite series, so I had been very excited for this new series since it was first announced, and just as I hoped, I had a great time with this one as well. However, I will say that I do believe one’s enjoyment of her previous series is probably a good indication of how one will feel about this one, because I do think the strengths and weaknesses are about the same as they were then.
To start, I really vibe with the characters. I love multi-POV fantasies, and I think having two main first-person POVS and then three secondary, third-person POVs to give a wider view of the world is a fun structure that I was glad to see her return to. Each perspective feels distinct, and despite their wildly different arcs, I always looked forward to each person’s sections. I also just really enjoy a self-aware dumbass who admits they probably shouldn’t be doing a thing, but they’re going to anyway. It’s much easier for me to tolerate a protagonist making the most chaotic choice when I don’t feel like the book expects me to agree that they’re totally in the right.
I’m not a reader who cares much about intricate world-building or magic systems, but I will mention that for the readers who do care about that, both of those aspects are also done very well, in my opinion. As with her previous series, she crafts a unique magic system (here, gem-based) in a sprawling world with history and characters who exist in different corners of it, but I never felt anything was over- or under-explained. There is still much to discover in the next two books, but this first book had plenty to give one a firm hand on the world.
Now for my criticism, and I had this feeling in The Bone Shard Emperor as well—the romance. It’s not that I don’t like the dynamics that she sets up, but I feel like the development is consistently rushed when it comes to the not-already-established couples. I’m a known enjoyer of fast-moving relationships when they’re done in a way that makes sense to me, but here, I didn’t believe these characters would jump to Big Feelings as fast as they did. Both sisters have a romance plot (one m/f, the other f/f), and while I genuinely did enjoy both of them, I also couldn’t help feeling like these characters were too guarded to jump to love and sacrifice in the time that they did, for a person they really did not yet know very well at all. Multiple times, a character would speak of their (future) love interest in more intense terms than they had so far displayed, and I just kept feeling like huh? When?
Apart from that, though, I really enjoyed myself with this one, and I can’t wait to read more. If you loved the Drowning Empire series and have not yet tried Andrea Stewart’s The Gods Below, I highly recommend you try it now.
