Overall I thought this was a good introduction to this series, but unfortunately something just didn't click with this book for me. I loved the setting as this book is inspired by African legends and I haven't read a lot of fantasy with such a focus, but the characters fell a little flat for me and there were quite a few info-dumps. This book is split into multiple perspective and I found the changes a little jarring at times. Without spoiling anything I think it was also a little frustrating one of the characters died quite early on in the book in terms of representation. Other than that this was a good book, but it just didn't quite work for me.

I wanted to like this book. Lost Gods is an African high fantasy about assassins and betrayal; I didn't think this premise could go wrong, but it did.

It's 2018. We should know better than introduce a deaf character just to kill him off for the abled main character's development. Fridging marginalized characters isn't ok.

In the first ~100 pages we are introduced to a world that had the potential to be really interesting, but the writing was dry and emotionless, the dialogues even more so. Everything was explained through long, meandering paragraphs of exposition that I can't consider anything but infodumps.

The only character who had a consistent (even if not that interesting) characterization for these first 100 pages was Neythan; this wouldn't have been a problem if it weren't for the fact that in these 100 pages I got four different PoVs, all of them rushed and full of graceless infodumps - so much that they felt like chapters of exposition rather than an actual story.

I did found some interesting ideas here and there - the first scene drew me in, and the scene under the waterfall was intriguing - but they weren't enough to make me want to continue this.

I enjoyed the beginning of this book, with the boys becoming assassins. However, with the introduction of the supernatural, I felt that it became too convoluted. I also felt that there were too many points of view that made it difficult to follow. I have no doubt others will love this book, but unfortunately, it just wasn't for me.