I honestly don’t know what to say. This was really good, but slow. It takes a while to get going and even then, the book meanders along which is the main reason why I gave this 4 stars. There’s no big bad going on, just you finding about Collette LeSange and how her grandfather changed her into an immortal (vampire, the word is never used) in 1834. Collette is going through some things. After 150 years she feels as if the God of Endings (Czernobog, the Slavic “god of endings”) has been there in Collette’s life where every bad things has happened. And now 150 years later (in the 1980s), she feels as if he is ready to close the door on her life forever. The sections of the book with Collette in the present, a French preschool teacher in upstate New York faltered a lot compared to the past sections until that portion of the book finally picks up and starts moving to an ending.
The God of Endings follows Anna who in 1834, who after losing her beloved father and brother, is taken in by her estranged grandmother and grandfather. Despite their best efforts, Anna dies of tuberculosis but is reborn as something different. Anna who longs for her grandmother and is very angry that her grandfather took her away from being reunited with her family in death is sent away by his mysterious helper Agoston. They cross an ocean and eventually Anna travels through Eastern Europe, through the Carpathians, which back then was near the Austrian Empire, Ottoman Empire, and Wallachian territories and settles there for a time with an older woman called Piroska and two twin boys she has taken in, Vano and Ehru. And just like the God of Endings, Ehru seems to be all dark, and Vano is like his twin, Belobog. The book jumps between the past and the present day in the 1980s with Anna, now known as Collette as a preschool teacher in upstate New York. She finds herself feeling increasingly hungry and what she usually does to sate her hunger does not seem to be working anymore. She is haunted now with dreams (she has not had for years) about her past and feels increasingly drawn to one of her charges, a little boy named Leo. Anna’s past takes you up to her living overseas during the Great War, World War I and then eventually we know she comes to settle in the U.S.
There are some things that I wish had been explained, we hear that Anna eventually grows and turns into a lovely woman. I was a little surprised that she could do that. There were also some other things such as Anna not having anything left of her that would make her a woman, instead she is now entirely without sex. It is mentioned that Anna’s grandfather was changed when he was an old man, but again, we don’t hear a lot about that or can even make sense of it. I could go on, but I do wish that Holland had expanded things a bit more. Or maybe she thought that people should know about vampires at this point so she didn’t want to go into it.
The flow of the book as I said was slow at first and then just meanders. I kept reading because I was interested. I did like the symbolism we get throughout the book and how though Anna had always been scared of Czernobog and you start to wonder if the god is haunting her, focused on making her pay. The ending though was brilliant I thought. I loved that Anna never thought that an ending could also be a gift.
