The Children of Gods and Fighting Men (the first book in Shauna Lawless’ Gael Song trilogy) has been on my TBR for a while now. I’ve gone on a bit of a historical/fae kick during January (I also recently finished Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel), so I figured this was a good time to read it.
The book is a (mostly) true narrative of Irish history at the end of the 10th century, with some fantastical elements sprinkled in. I didn’t know a ton about this period, but I knew enough that when a character named Brian Boru showed up, that he was going to be important. We are given the point-of-view of two women from warring immortal species: Gormflaith, a Formorian and the recent widow to the King of Dublin, who is trying to protect both her position and that of her son, as well as Fódla, a healer of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a reclusive race sworn to end the Formorians, sent to the kingdom of Munster as a spy.
I think this book is a perfect example of liking a book that has an unlikeable main character. Gormflaith is an absolute menace. She’s a scheming, lying, murdering seductress in a world that doesn’t treat women with much respect. I didn’t like her, but she was an extremely compelling character to read about. Her motivations made sense, she’s basically Cersei Lannister if she was both more ruthless and more cunning. Fódla’s story was more straightforward, and she was easier to like, which had a tempering effect on Gormflaith’s outright villainy.
The book definitely has an “ending”, but a lot of things are left up in the air. I’ll definitely be picking up book two, but in the meantime, I’m trying to restrain myself from Googling the real-life characters present in the novel (always a shame when events from a thousand years ago are spoilers for my modern-day fiction)!
