My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Title: Ruthless Gods (Something Dark and Holy, #2)

Author: Emily A. Duncan

Format: eBook (NetGalley)

Pages: 432

Publication Date: April 7, 2020

Categories: Horror, Romance, Young Adult, Fantasy

Disclaimer: **I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

Darkness never works alone…

Nadya doesn’t trust her magic anymore. Serefin is fighting off a voice in his head that doesn’t belong to him. Malachiasz is at war with who–and what–he’s become. 

As their group is continually torn apart, the girl, the prince, and the monster find their fates irrevocably intertwined. They’re pieces on a board, being orchestrated by someone… or something. The voices that Serefin hears in the darkness, the ones that Nadya believes are her gods, the ones that Malachiasz is desperate to meet—those voices want a stake in the world, and they refuse to stay quiet any longer.

Thank you to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read this eARC.

Wow, Ruthless Gods. So I just finished it and I amstill processing how I feel about it. I keep wavering between 3.5-4 stars so I’m just rounding up and keeping it at 4 stars.

Wicked Saints, the first book in this series was bloody and dark. I think Ruthless Gods is bloodier and darker…but somewhat at times repetitive. Malachiasz (I will never know how to spell or say his name right off the bat 🤷🏻‍♀️)has turned into a monster after his quest for knowledge and power. Serefin is possessed by some god he doesn’t believe in, and Nadya is bereft that her god has stopped speaking to her and is still confused by her feelings for Malachiasz. Their descent into hell, or this war between gods, seems to have only begun.

The mood for this brutal, strange, scary world is spot on. It is dark, bleak and full of monsters or should I say gods? There is nothing shiny and bright in this world – there is bitter winter and darkness for the setting. The author definitely does a great job creating an atmosphere that is full of mysticism and things we humans cannot quite comprehend. At times I didn’t understand what Malachiasz even was…does anyone really know? Is he a god? Or does he just have god powers? Is he still evolving? Sometimes I felt like this book was one big question mark. It questions magic, divinity, power and humanity.

Serefin is in an internal fight with a god who is trying to control him. He is such the opposite of Malachiasz who wanted all the power and knowledge. Plus if you thought there was a lot of self-harm with the blood magic in the first book…well, this one takes it there and then some! Some parts were just gruesome, at least for me since I’m weak when it comes to horror.

Malachiasz, this boy…seriously. I don’t trust him, at ALL. And he has turned into something so monstrous. Nadya shouldn’t be trusting him at all either…but he is her weakness. They are such a strange couple, sweet at times, totally bad for each other most times and a bloody mess together (literally) all the time. It just gets messier between them by the end of the book. There is so much angst between them, a little too much for me. I just wanted someone to make the right decision and stick with it (looking at you Nadya!).

And Nadya…she might have frustrated me the most because no one knows what she is or what her power is. All the speculation was starting to test my patience. I’m just ready to find out something more concrete about their situations. I did enjoy the break from these three main characters when a new character enters the story to shed more light about the gods.

Overall, as a second book I think it was better than Wicked Saints because it was faster paced and with a greater sense of urgency that I thought was missing from the first book. There is more suffering, more wondering, more horror in this book but that’s pretty much the tone of the story, destruction and rebirth. Emily A. Duncan is definitely creative and staunch in her world building. If you want bloody, she give you bloody in this book.

I’m ready to see how this series ends and I wonder if any of them make it out alive.