I got to the end of this book and couldn’t help but wonder… what was the point of all this?

Two gods, Nature and Nurture, decide to have a competition to see who is more important. No reason, no exposition, just ‘let’s have a contest’. They are each going to pick a pair of twins to raise their own way, and those twins will be pitted against each other once they’re grown. (Side note: it’s not twins separated at birth, as you might expect. Just twins. They each get a set. No explanation.) And that’s… that’s it. That’s the plot.

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It’s an interesting premise, but that’s where the positives ended for me. First of all: perspectives. The gods had very little nuance or interest to their characters; they had a goal, and they just did it. It would have been much more interesting to read from the perspectives of the humans, who don’t know they are being manipulated by gods until the very end.

It felt like the sort of book with lots of Important IdeasTM, but I got to the end and I still don’t know what they were. It was clear the author was trying to explore ideas of gender, but we were stuck in circles for the whole story. Nature and Nurture are genderless, but take on male and female forms respectively when they come down to earth. In dialogue they agree that gender is a human construct, but in the narrative we see the male Nature being violent and uncaring while the female Nurture is – you guessed it – nurturing and caring, almost smothering. Nurture tells us she pays little attention to the exact human form she takes, then immediately tells us all about her womanly curves and says ‘I shook my very dainty feminine fist at the world at large’. The two female twins, one raised by Nature, one by Nurture, are both painfully “I’m not like other girls” types, and when they eventually meet they actually argue about the right way to be not-like-other-girls. Every statement made in the characters’ dialogue or thoughts was immediately negated by the action, and we went round and round in circles for the whole book.

As for the world-building, I don’t know where we are or when we are. It seems to be generic dark ages, I briefly thought it might be set around the Crusades but I’m not 100% sure. Some of it seemed to be set in the Middle East, some of it in Western Europe, some of it on a tropical island with lions. It didn’t feel at all rooted in a particular setting which doesn’t always bother me, but in this particular case the story just felt very unmoored.

Nothing came together at all for me in this book. I got to the end feeling like nothing had happened. It’s clear that there were a lot of ideas that went into this book, but none of them were explored in a satisfying way. 

I received a free copy of this book for review. All opinions are my own.