I enjoyed The God Makers, the fifth book in the Sisters of the Storm series. I must admit things got off to a bit of a rocky start: despite it being billed as a stand-alone novel the reader is thrown into the deep end with little to no explanation as to who the main characters are and what’s going on. We then transition almost immediately into a series of action scenes that, while well-written, do not do much to flesh out the two characters we have just met.
Luckily, after these opening chapters things slow down enough for us to spend more time with the two protagonists, Aleena and Baezha, and once we have a better idea of what they have been through the story becomes more interesting. I especially liked the dichotomy here between the sisters trying to escape the mistakes of the past and the enticing lure of the shady alchemist cabal that claim to be able to correct any flaw.
Of course, nothing is quite so simple and the two sisters slowly unravel the knots that tie together the various strands of the alchemists’ web. The action is well-written and fast-paced, with simple but effective prose that keeps things clipping along without getting bogged down in overly long descriptive passages. It’s a style reminiscent of pulpy post-war fantasy, or more recently the much-loved David Gemmell, and I enjoyed being pulled from one scene to the next.
My other little quibbles concern the occasional clunky dialogue and some small editing and formatting issues, including using the wrong quotation marks after the dash punctuation, a consistent problem found throughout the book that took me out of story a bit, but that can easily be fixed.
Last but not least, there are some particularly nasty scenes peppered throughout, including violence towards children.