The God Engines by John Scalzi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of the more engaging books I have read recently. Fast paced and short, I think most people could finish this in a day while fast readers could finish in hours.
The characters in this book are portrayed with depth and realism. It is a fantasy book but with enough realism (or exaggerated realism) to make it easy to slip into the minds of the characters. You begin to understand the interpersonal relationships and not only how they affect the people in the book but how those relationships can affect an entire civilization and how we act towards one another and what we must do to survive physically and mentally.
“Don’t discount that part of who he was just because you didn’t know it. None of us are all of who we are to any one person.”
The book focuses on the faith of a civilization in its god and the effect that has on everyone involved from the god itself, to the civilization, to vanquished gods, to people who know nothing of the gods.
The book does a great job of showing what happens when faith is tested, when faith fails, and what an unwavering faith – for good or for bad – can do. The faith in this book is portrayed as a religious faith, but I feel it can be applied to any faith. The fact is that faithful believe so strongly in an idea, that they believe what they are told without questioning it. Is this good? Bad? I will leave it up to the reader to decide where they stand.
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