This was an epic, fast-paced, very well-written urban fantasy that kept me up night after night. The best analogy I can think to this work is if someone took Neil Gaiman’s _American Gods_ and mixed in for good measure the now ended and much missed NBC series _Grimm_, though even that combination doesn’t cover everything as the scope is so much wider and deeper than either the novel or the TV series (I have not watched the series based on _American Gods_ or read the novel sequel). Both are two of my favorite things, but the amount of time and space covered in _Paternus: Rise of the Gods_ is staggering. I expected the novel to not be confined to one city (Portland, Oregon as in _Grimm_) or one country (the United States, as in _American Gods_), as indeed the scope is worldwide, but the amount of time covered absolutely blew me away.



Ok, backing up a bit, the basic premise of the story is that the gods, monsters, and heroes of myth and legend are real, be they Christian, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, Indian, the various Native American and Mesoamerican mythologies, Celtic, Norse, or what have you in origin. In a number of cases some individuals are known as different gods, monsters, or heroes in different stories and mythologies but in the end there are long-lived (very very long lived) and quite powerful individuals around the world who gave rise to these legends. Some appear completely human and except for their abilities and long life spans are essentially human, while others very clearly are not. Some of the clearly non-human are able to pass for humans, others are simply able to hide, but they all have monstrous characteristics, suggesting unions of humans and animals, something mythology has been rife with (think minotaurs or centaurs for instance), including amazingly unions with real world animals that are long extinct.



Though there appear to be somewhat neutral gods/heroes/monsters, most appear to fall in one camp or another, either essentially good (demonstrating care and concern for not only fellow gods and monsters that are also good, but also the humans of the world, called either the mtoto (singular) or watoto (plural), a Swahili word meaning “baby,” or parvuli (plural) or parvulus (singular) from Latin, meaning variously both “child” or “small” but also “brief,” “trivial,” and “unimportant”) or essentially evil. In the course of the book, the reader discovers that the two camps are going to war, something that has occurred a few times in the past (massively destructive affairs that thousands of years later are still talked about).



Behind both the good camp and the bad camp two very powerful individuals emerge, one orchestrating events, the other pushed into a leadership role that he was arguably destined to always fulfill by his very nature. To say more than that I think would be spoiling things, but I found both beings compelling with considerable depth and not always clear-cut motivations (and I found this to be a good thing, intriguing and a mystery that kept my interest throughout the novel).



While dealing with almost immeasurably powerful beings, the author skillfully grounds the proceedings a good bit by including the saga of Fiona Patterson and Zeke Prisco, two seemingly normal human teenagers who are swept up in events. Or are they exactly normal? I found the two, especially Fiona, relatable, likable, and a good way to have events and world building explained to the reader without dry or tedious info dumps. They weren’t just damsels (or, um, dudes) in distress, as both had agency, a life outside of the struggle between the gods and monsters, and had and have roles to play.



The book had a lot of action and some very well described battle scenes, something that makes sense given the central conflict in the story. It was always easy to follow, something I don’t always find to be the case. It was perhaps doubly challenging to write no doubt in that so much combat involved some very powerful, clearly non-human beings, not more “typical” fantasy combat such as between knights wielding swords or the like.



At times – welcomingly – the book veered into horror as some of the creatures were, well, horrifying (as were their actions). Indeed a couple were quite nightmarish and I relished reading about them. The fact that even these creatures had some real world antecedent, some grounding in the real world of real animals and history, made them all the more horrifying and compelling to me.



This appears to be the first book in a series but I will say it read quite well I think as a stand alone novel. I certainly wanted more but I wasn’t left with any feeling it wasn’t a complete story or had an ending that wasn’t satisfying. I definitely look forward to more in the series and now that a lot of the requisite world building is accomplished, I can’t wait to see what is next for readers.