The Orphanage of Gods is another Netgalley read and one that I was really intrigued by the premise. I love anything to do with Gods and their offspring, like Percy Jackson is a fave and Strange the Dreamer makes me swoon. This book has the added bonus of the “godspawn” being in a precarious position with a lot of added politics and drama. I loved the fact that this book had so much going on within it and that you were never really sure what the heck was going to happen next. I really wanted to give this book 5 stars but I felt there were certain aspects of the story that didn’t get as much attention as I would have liked and made the story feel a little jumpy and disconnected.

The main characters in this story are mainly the children of Gods. I think it was a really interesting concept to have all these hugely powerful children being so powerless within their own country. Each of them had a backstory that very clearly influenced their motives as characters and I was so thankful for that. I really wanna touch on Kestral, Hero and Joshua’s relationship real quick without spoiling anything, this confused me and is probably the biggest reason that The Orphanage of Gods didn’t get 5 stars. This whole breakdown seemed to happen so quickly I got whiplash and I won’t even get into Kestral’s relationship with Eliza, I’ll save that for further down. All in all though taking my issues with certain relationships out of it I think the characters were definitely interesting and I would definitely love more books about them as people.


I think my best bits of The Orphanage of Gods would have to be learning about them all as characters and the different powers they all had. I also really enjoyed the confusion aspect that comes into at the end. I think what makes this book so good is the fact that the back stories very much feed into the ending and everything that happens there. Hero’s character development is one of the best arcs and I love where she ends up and how everything boils over for her. I just enjoyed the politics in this book, both within the actual world and also within the god children’s camp, they were both really interesting factions of the story.

I mentioned above that the worst bit for me was how disjointed this book could feel at times, especially when it came to relationships with the different characters. Nothing seemed to flow as nicely as it should have and I was always sort of caught off guard when things started happening. I wanted for there to be a more natural growth and development between the characters and for it to blossom over time. Another thing that made the worst bits would have to be the ending, I found it to be super rushed and I wished that there had been just a little more explanation about everything. It just felt really disconnected from everything and extremely anti-climatic, I wasn’t really sure what the end point was aiming to be.

I definitely would recommend The Orphanage of Gods. I think the premise is interesting and although the story is a little disjointed at times reading it was actually enjoyable. I’m so glad I picked it up!

I was so excited to read this! The book itself is GORGEOUS and I especially love the Illumicrate version, sadly I had missed that version and was about to purchase it when I got the email from Netgalley saying that I have been approved to read it!

This is usually my kind of book, gods, heroes, history, fantasy etc. Sounds very much on the same vein as Percy Jackson and I loved that series. I was sad that this didn’t blow me away like I thought it would. The three character POVs are a little confusing and unnecessarily complicated. I found it hard to connect with any of the characters, the only one with a bit of hope for me was Hero but sadly, her characterisation and story fell flat with the introduction of the other two. The shift of POVs just added to the confusion, I was unsure who was speaking at times and it just left me frustrated.

It all felt a little too focused on the action and not enough focus on the characterisation & world building, this made it feel rushed and it desperately needed breathing room. It’s just too intense! A duology would have been more beneficial.

Just gutted that I didn’t like it as much as I had hoped, it was such a good premise for a book but left me with more questions than answers. I will probably come back to it at a later date and give it another chance but as it stands i’m a little disappointed.

Thank you to Netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the opportunity to read it

Firstly I would like to thank NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this book; all opinions discussed below are entirely my own.

This book was honestly quite a disappointment for me, I was so excited to read this book because the premise sounds fabulous and really sounds like something I would enjoy, but the reality was actually very different. I really struggled to connect to any of the characters and honestly struggled to understand the motivations of most of the characters. There was very little world-building in this story; we’re shoved into the book in the middle of the plot, and we get very little information about the world itself, or how the world came to be. Sometimes I don’t mind this in a book if it’s done well, but personally I don’t think it was done well in this book. I saw a comment saying that this plot is meant to be set in our world, and I never got that from the book? Like that was never clear to me, and I think this was the overall problem that things were just not set out clearly and were all a bit muddled.

I think the main issue with this plot is that there is far too much stuffed into one book. If this had been split into three story’s it might have worked so much better but we had three different perspectives, all of which were muddled and rushed from my view, and I just never really felt the overall arcs and motivations of the characters were fully fledged out. I feel like we never got the time to really understand what was going on, and considering that this wasn’t a short story it’s a bit confusing to me how we never got things explained. There were so many different motivations and plot points throughout this book but I just never connected to them, or was invested in it. In a world such as this you would normally expect to feel some tension about what’s going to happen, and who will emerge victorious but I never felt that tension, I was honestly a bit bored about the plots and didn’t particularly care about what happened.

Again, in terms of the characters, I didn’t particularly care about any of the characters? I enjoyed Hero’s perspective, but when we jump to the other two perspectives she all but disappears; and I think this was the main problem for me, at each change in perspective the other main characters seem to become forgotten and so it makes it hard for you to feel invested in them. And again I struggled to understand their motivations; the relationship between Eliza and Kestrel in particular really confused me because it literally seemed to come out of nowhere, and then it almost seems to suggest that Eliza manipulated Kestrel into loving her, but it’s never clear? And again with Raven; we’re told that she’s meant to be the leader but I never really understood why? Yeah I get that people like her but it takes more than that to be a leader, and it just didn’t make any sense to me. We’re not really shown that she’s any better than anyone else so I just was left confused. Also, the whole Joshua plot point again had me scratching my head; he was honestly giving me whiplash a bit with his changing opinions and characterisation. I completely get where the author was trying to go with his character but it just fell quite flat for me.

I really think this book had some good potential, and the author did seem to begin on a good note, but it just was too much rushed into one story. I personally think it should have been either a duet or a trilogy, so that we actually had time to build up the world and connect to these characters. Rather than rush a lot of plots into one book. I didn’t consider DNF’ing this book at any point though, so this is why I gave it two stars.

I wanted to love this. The premise is amazing, but the writing is clunky and the characters are unsympathetic.

This book was a bit of a disappointment but I'm sure some people will love it. I just didn't become invested in these characters so didn't really care what happened to them. There were some moments that felt unrealistic, especially the insta-love. It had potential but fell prey to some YA tropes and mistakes

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

After struggling with another book for months this book was a really enjoyable easy read.

The premise of the book is that they live in a world where gods used to live among the people, that is until humans got too scared of their powers and turned against the entire race. This led to civil wars until eventually the humans won and the gods were killed or went into hiding.

The POV changes between 3 characters which would not be a problem but you aren't told who it is each time so you have to play guess who to work it out. Although it seemed to me that it was whoever was conscious in the story. I did not have a problem with this but at the end I felt like two of the three POV characters did not get any closure so to speak and were kind of forgotten about.

Reading other people's reviews it seems pretty confusing, some people are saying there's no action and others too much. If I am honest it felt quite rushed to me, like when a teenager is telling a story and doesn't breathe in between plot points 'and then this happened, and then this and then this!' This may be because the author was trying to fit too much stuff into the story but I did enjoy it and it certainly did keep me on my toes!

Overall I really liked this book and I would definitely read it again. I just felt some of the characters were given a load of background and story and then were dragged around (sometimes literally) with the other characters just to be there but ultimately their story unfinished.

THE ORPHANAGE OF THE GODS has a nice concept, but severely lacks on execution.

There is a lot of flashback that's intended as exposition. In the first part, probably half of every (very long) chapter is memories,. Sometimes this comes in the middle of a scene, other times it's at the end. Often, these flashbacks don't clear up anything, just drag me out of the action.

It was a very confusing book, with three different POVs. During action set pieces, I had no idea what was happening, and the explanations afterwards didn't help. The two POV changes were right after a 'set piece', the sudden wrench in perspective didn't help matters.

The first POV is Hero, and for a while I thought she would be the only character. There's not much to her, she's very one dimensional and didn't appear to have any goals other than rescuing her friend - no wishes or emotions. She was simply cold and focused. Joshua is horrible - tries to explain it away as grief, but just comes across as ungrateful and unhinged.

The next POV was a little girl, Raven. The unexpected shift meant that I didn't care at all for her, and she just seemed angry all the time. For some reason, she was to be the future leader because she was smart? I'm not sure why anyone would think a 10 year old with no experience was the best idea for a leader, but a few stirring words about her being the dead leader's chosen successor and everyone was suddenly desperate to follow her - revering her like a saint. And after fighting and fighting this fate, she then had a change of mind and fought for them.

The final POV was Kestrel, but it took two very confused chapters to realise it wasn't Hero speaking. This was the most action packed, confusing part - half the book. Things just happened, new ideas introduced. It was impossible to work out what was going to happen - and not in a surprising plot-twist way. That the plot seemed to randomly lurch from set piece to set piece with little explanation of what was happening.

The world-building was lacking, with little feel for the world or its history. Every seemed to hate the gods, and half-gods, but why is never explained - not even 'people got angry at abuses of power'. The powers gradually became more obvious as the book went on.

The ending is vague, feeling like the first book in a series, but I haven't found any evidence that this is true. I'm not quite sure what happened, and what the epilogue meant.

I unfortunately couldn’t get into this book so I did not finish it.

I couldn’t get into the plot and the characters didn’t really interest me.

I'm sorry to have DNFed The Orphanage of Gods as I was kindly given an e-arc in exchange for an honest review. But unfortunately I couldn't do it. Life has so many great books, let's all focus on the ones we will love, this one just didn't do it for me. Regardless, someone else could fall in love with it.

DNF @ 40%

Like so many others it seems, I was beyond excited for The Orphanage of Gods because it gave me strong Strange the Dreamer vibes. Right in the beginning it was clear that those expectations were completely unfounded.

I wasn't a big fan of the way The Orphanage of Gods was written. The characters mull over tragedies endlessly. They go in circles on and on about things that happened to them very vaguely so that the reader doesn't know what has happened but still has to endure the endless cycle of whimpers. This happens to be a pet peeve of mine; I think reaching suspense by making the main characters constantly mull over their adversities without revealing said mishaps, is a cheap way of achieving a thrill.

The writing wasn't only vague and overly-dramatic, it was also a bit too much at times.

'If she's still alive' he says at last, he's never said if before.

🤨 It is quite an achievement to live 18 years as a native English speaker without ever using the word 'if'

Also the characters did pretty much nothing for me. Hero was the whimper (and I don't even know if she knew herself what she was always whimpering about). Joshua is the worst ever. He is unnecessarily violent, totally brainless and such an unreliable, bad friend. His storyline was that he was once a 'gentle, kind person' but nah, I don't buy that. He was too much of a jerk.

When I first heard about The Orphanage of Gods, I had an idea in my head about what the story would be.  I imagined a wildly fantastical story, sort of like Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor.  And there were definitely aspects of that... if you cross it with The Darkest Minds and add a bit of an X-Men feel.  I love all three of those things, so you can imagine how excited I got as I read more of this book!


The premise is simple.  The children of Amareth live in orphanages, under guard their entire lives.  Any child who shows signs of god like power disappears in the night and is never heard of again.  No one has escaped this fate... until Hero and Joshua.  On the run, afraid for their lives and faced with the prospect of trying to rescue their best friend, Kestrel, the stage has been set for an epic story that Helena absolutely delivers!


We jump straight into the action on page one and it doesn't stop until the very end, which I loved.  I have to say, I'm not usually a fan of books written in the present tense, but I loved how it made this story completely immersive and real.  The writing was visceral and fierce and just made me want to keep reading and reading (I read this book so fast)!


Parts of the story are told in flashback, which gives us a better understanding of the relationships between Hero, Joshua and Kestrel and how they've handled the way they've been forced to grow up.  You really get a sense that these characters would do just about anything for each other, so when their relationships start to become more strained as the book progresses it makes it even more painful to read.
Hero and Kestrel's relationship was probably my favourite.  They may not be blood related, but they're as close as sisters and trust each other implicitly.  Getting to read from both of their perspectives was really beautiful, and the way Helena described their characters and their relationship with each other was perfection.


I think what really struck me about this story was the way it made me question the way we view the world, and how power can corrupt even the most innocent people.  It's very difficult throughout the book to decide who the antagonist is - so many characters have legitimate reasons for acting the way they do, even if what they're doing may not be the right thing.  Some characters started off as "good", but their choices and actions force you to shift your perspective.


I genuinely loved this story, and I'm actually really happy that it's a stand-alone novel.  There aren't enough well written and perfectly wrapped up stand-alone books in the world for my liking, so while I'd love to read more about these characters and this world, I'm completely satisfied with the way it ended.

In a world where gods and humans exist, a revolution happened twenty years ago by humans called the Guard. A revolution meant to kill every single god and half-god. Now only some of them are still there, and all the children left behind since then go to an orphanage where they being watched day and night for signs of them being gods. There are seven attributes that make a god, such as speed and strength, premonition, beauty, endurance, the ability to heal oneself, the silver of their blood or their demesne, which is the god's particular gift, while half-gods only have some of these seven. Their blood isn't always silver to begin with but will change color and be before they turn eighteen, which is why in the orphanage there is a blood test eighteen years after they were brought here. If their blood is red, they're free to go in the world, if it's silver, they're sent away to Elida, never to be seen again.

At the beginning of the story, we're following Hero, a half-god and Joshua, a god who just escaped from the orphanage — being the first ones to ever do that — as Joshua's blood test was coming closer, but sadly, Kestrel, a human and Hero's sister in everything but blood, who was supposed to escape with them, had been captured. So Hero and Joshua are going toward Elida to break her out. I found the beginning quite slow, but it soon speeds up as the two of them meet other gods part of the resistance and finally arrive to Elida.

The book is divided in three parts, the first one being narrated by Hero, then Raven, a ten years old shapeshifter girl from the resistance, and then Kestrel. I found myself loving all of these three girls (along with other characters), feeling for them and their troubles and doubts and fears. We could tell Raven was only ten by the way she was narrating, which I really liked. Everyone else made her a prodigy child, but she was still only a child and it showed.

The settings of the story were pretty dark, with the revolution, the resistance, all the fights, not a lot of hope, and ended with a kind of bittersweet ending but the characters still found some happiness at times with each other, and even some love (I was really surprised and happy to see a romance between two girls and even though I found their relationship a little rushed they were great together).

The relationships were also my favorite part of the book, all of them, especially Hero and Kestrel's. They loved each other so much and would do anything for the other and that's exactly the kind of relationship I love. They were always here to support and help the other. I loved that the main relationship of this story was a platonic one.

I was a little disappointed with the end, I think I wish the end was later, that we could know more about what they did after everything happened. Like I said, the ending was kind of bittersweet, outside I was smiling while reading the epilogue but inside I was just screaming. I wish we had more.

The synopsis of this book drew me in, but sadly left me wanting much more. I liked the plot and the dialogue felt natural, but the world-building and character development was a let-down. Sadly, it had the potential to be so much more. The descriptive writing style was great, but didn't hold my attention. It felt like I was forcing myself to get through the last few pages.

I liked the story baseline but it didn’t hold up for me. I prefer much more action and world building. World building for me is what gets me lost in a story and it didn’t have that for me. Sorry!

The premises of The Orphanage Of The Gods were interesting but it turned out to be something completely different and I didn't like it very much. The main problem was the action. There are some books that lack of it, while here is overwhelming. It was definitely too much. Consequently, there wasn't enough world building and the characters didn't captivated me at all. Sorry, but it wasn't my cup of tea.

Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and NetGalley for providing me with an Advance Review Copy in exchange for an honest review.

I’ve read a lot of commentary about this book in the blogging community, so I was looking forward to reading it. It seems like this book is really dividing opinions with some readers loving it and others hating it. I have a strange tendency in life to like things that other people don’t, so I was curious to see how what side of the debate I would fall on with this book.

The premise sounded great, after a rebellion against the Gods, their children must struggle to survive, isolated and cut off from society at large. I know what you’re thinking - “isn’t that the plot of Strange the Dreamer?” Well, it is nothing like Strange the Dreamer so don’t go into it thinking it will be or you will be disappointed (or pleasantly surprised if you are some kind of weirdo that didn’t like StD).

The novel follows three different points of view, that of Hero, a half-human, half-god who has healing powers, Raven a young shapeshifter and Kestrel, a human friend of Hero’s. I’m guessing the author has a thing for birds? I can dig it, I do too. The different points of view were well-written and felt distinct from one another. I didn’t quite feel I got a grasp of who the characters were though, particularly Hero, and I wasn’t as interested in her characterisation as much as the other two. If you are more motivated by characters rather than plot this book may be a difficult read for you. I didn’t feel like I got to know the characters very well and thus didn’t care so much about what ultimately happened to them. Joshua in particular is an utter git and it’s been a while since I have disliked a character as much as I disliked him. Why he has two girls fawning over him I couldn’t understand.

The novel starts quite slowly (if I'm being completely frank the first quarter or so is plain boring) but picks up around the 25% mark. There is also very little joy to be found in this story which I found quite hard going at times. It’s all very bleak, not surprising given it looks at themes around the brutality of war and the corrupting influence of power and there are some genuinely shocking and unsettling moments in the novel.

The book has quite an otherworldly atmosphere to it which makes sense given the chaotic events experienced by the characters. Some of the narrative can also be quite confusing which could be interpreted by some as poor plotting, and by others as a representation of the breakneck events being experienced by the characters. I also struggled to visualise the various settings in the novel and again, one could say this makes sense given the context, but it felt an area that was somewhat lacking to me.

In conclusion, I don't know about this one, I really don't know. It’s a well-written book and the author is clearly very talented. It’s more sophisticated and grown up than other YA novels and has a more subtle voice than other books of this genre. That said, the target audience felt unclear to me, I wasn’t sure who this book would particularly appeal to and I struggled with the characterisation and some aspects of the plot. It’s certainly an unusual book, it’s very different and I can see why reviews for it are so polarised.

I was attracted by the synopsys but unfortunately this is not my cup of tea.
It's full of potential but I think that both world building and characters need some more developing.
There're a lot of good ideas but somehow they never deliver their full potential.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC

I don’t know what I was expecting with The Orphanage Of The Gods but it wasn’t what I got! I thought maybe it would be a bit of a Percy Jackson-esque book, but it definitely wasn’t. The premise was interesting, and the writing was good but it just wasn’t for me I’m afraid!

#TheOrphanageOfGods sounded right up my alley. Hero & Joshua are a half god and a god who have escaped from an orphanage who are on a mission to rescue their friend Kestrel from ‘the guards’ who enforce the killing of all people who are gods and half gods.

The action is non stop in this book, but I didn’t think this was a good thing. It left little time for world building (why was their a revolution against the gods? Was there an incident that galvanised the whole thing? How long did it take?) and relationship building, which left me not caring about the relationships between characters and also feeling that they were very shallow and superficial. I felt like certain chapters could have been skipped, and the space given over to character and world building.

I loved the premise of this book, but unfortunately it wasn’t for me.

Thank you to #NetGalley and the publisher for my free advance copy in return for an unbiased review.

DNF @ 40%

I really wanted to love this but sadly it just didn't pull me in. The concept and plot are full of potential however, the execution just didn't appeal to me. I couldn't connect to any of the characters and struggled to become invested in the story. I also got quite confused at times about what was actually going on and it wasn't always clear who's point of view we were reading from at times.

As soon as I saw that this was about Gods, I immediately wanted to get my hands on it and this feeling was only compelled further from reading the blurb…  The gods were all but wiped out, the children they left behind have been imprisoned in an orphanage and any who show signs of divine power vanish from their beds in the night, all knowledge of their existence denied. Who doesn’t want to dive in head first?

The book is set in a world where there are humans, and gods (people with silver blood and magical powers). We also have half god, meaning that the person only has some of the attributes of a god. All of the Gods have varying powers it is very rare to find more than one person with the same power. The gifts the Gods have are called demesne.

The book starts in the middle of the action. Hero and her self-adopted brother are on the run and are racing to find their friend/sister Kestrel and the fearful Guardsmen on their trail. This scene had me on the edge of my seat, and kept me there. It was brilliant and this pace was kept up throughout the book. Two generations ago, Gods started to be born from mortal women and soon became so violent and unpredictable that the humans turned against them and started using the guardsmen to defeat the gods. As readers we are quickly introduced to Josh’s power, which is the ability to manipulate light. We’re not immediately told what Hero’s power is, but it is clear that Josh is much more powerful than she is although she has the ability to heal others. Hero and Josh’s relationship is strained and is getting worse the more time that passes without Kestrel, Hero’s sister (not by blood). The three of them have stuck together since they met at the Orphanage - it’s been them against the world for as long as they can remember.

The world it is set in is more modern than I thought it would be and I thought the world-building was done well. Although it would maybe nice to learn a little more about why people hate the gods. But aside from that, I thought this was a really strong element of the book. The book is written in three parts, each narrated in first person. Part one is told by Hero, a seventeen-year-old girl who has escaped from an orphanage (where children are kept, in case they are gods) with her brother Joshua. Part two is told by Raven a ten-year-old girl. Finally, part three is told from Kestrel's perspective.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I thought all the characters were very well built. There's a theme of power corrupting, for gods and humans alike ran throughout and kept my interest. I think it was entertaining while still having a lot of depth, and I would definitely recommend it to others.