Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me a chance to read this in advance. From the premise and other reviewers I was eager to get into it, as it reminded me of Jemisin, the leading female sci fi writer of our time. Unfortunately I did quite struggle with this, but can assure it is not the book's fault! My pandemic brain isn't cooperating like it used to, and I find myself having problems concentrating. This novel is beautifully detailed and multilayered, so if you can get into it, you are in for a ride. The chapters are really short, and the cast is huge. This means you need to pay attention. I am sure at a later point, this will be a 5 star read for me. I am thankful to have been able to look into this, which will be helpful in better recommending this title in store to my customers.

No Gods, No Monsters is the first instalment in The Convergence Saga, a contemporary fantasy about the complex nature of injustice and identity and the part they play in your fate. Laina awakens one morning to devastating news; her brother, Lincoln, who she hadn't seen for seven years primarily due to his transient lifestyle caused by drug addiction, has been tragically shot and killed at the hands of a City of Boston police officer, and she is currently standing beside his deceased body. She is also acutely aware that finding out the real truth of what happened will be no easy feat. Then an enigmatic individual sends her a link to a video of the incident actually taking place, and she is shocked that it not only reveals that werewolves exist, but it depicts Lincoln shapeshifting from a human into a werewolf just before he was brutally murdered. However, when Laina tries to share the video online she finds herself up against shadowy unknown entities who do not appear to want to truth to be set free. The unedited version of the video is repeatedly taken down by a group who seem to be dedicating a lot of their time towards keeping the secret that monsters really do exist.

Laina, and a handful of others, are hellbent on revealing to the wider population the existence of animal shapeshifters, witches and other supernatural beings, but there are also those devoted to obscuring the truth. What ensues is a compulsive and enthralling tale encompassing beings of myth and legend, powerful gods and clandestine underground organisations. Utilising several multilayered storylines and switching seamlessly between the perspectives of many of the superbly painted characters, Turnbull has crafted a world rich in both intricacy and atmosphere in which the immersive prose serves only to capture your interest further. Despite its undeniable supernatural aspects, this is a profoundly human story and presents the struggles and real-world topical issues in a fascinating way that is relevant to the story being told. The cast is as strong and engaging as it is diverse with multiracial and LGBTQ+ representation and each character is both flawed and relatable. With excellent characterisation, a beautifully woven plot, perceptive social commentary, unexpected twists and taut speculative elements, this is a thoroughly entertaining fantasy. Highly recommended.

I really liked the overall storyline and how Turnball used the narration to keep me on my toes. I found myself learning more and more in a very organic way as I kept reading. The switching in point of view and how details came out kept me interested and fascinated in how Turnball came up with the story. I am definitely interested in reading more of his works in the future. I also thought the cast of characters were interesting and dynamic. Each character was specifically flawed and detailed enough to be invested.

That said, I did feel a bit lost in some of the way the plot worked itself out. I felt like the book fell into the "first book in a series trap" where everything was set up with incredibly little payoff. Although I think Turnball's writing is unique, I would have preferred a longer story with more plot or details other than merely introducing us to the characters. I also thought that the beginning was a bit slow for me. I kept moving over to other books instead of being truly captivated by this book.

I initially became aware of the phenomenal writer Cadwell Turnbull after hearing his short story, Jump, on the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. No Gods, No Monsters is his second novel, and it is safe to say he is establishing himself as a SFF writer to watch. In this rich novel, we are drawn into a world where monsters are real, where people genuinely possess supernatural powers, and inevitably, there are dark forces at work.

When Laina’s brother, Lincoln, is found dead and naked in the street, shot by a police officer, it opens her eyes to a side of her brother, and a side of reality, beyond her comprehension. Monsters are real, and Lincoln was one of them. With her partner, Ridley, and a few other allies, Laina traverses this disruption to the norm, as well as trying to juggle jobs, families, and all the other everyday nonsense we all have to deal with.

But that’s just part of the story. There are a handful of beguiling characters, secret societies, mystical entities, and disembodied voices to explore. The relaxed, almost conversational tone of Turnbull’s writing makes it effortless to go along with the fantastical plot. His character development is extraordinary; there are lots of players in this novel, and each is so well-established that it is (mostly) easy to follow along. I loved the switches between multiple narrators and perspectives, and seeing them come together in a devastating finale.

I love how the LGBTQ community is widely represented in this novel without serving as a plot point. I had to check some of my own prejudices about human (and monster) relationships a couple of times, which is fantastic. And I haven’t even touched on the parallels that can be drawn between the oppression of the monsters, and the BLM movement. It seems a little redundant for me to say “what I think Turnbull is doing here…” I’ll let the work speak for itself.

The world Cadwell has so deftly created is one not so detached from reality. A group of “outsiders” rise up, provoking an initial restrained outrage from spectators, and then an eventual attention outage. I am delighted to learn this is the first in The Convergence Saga series, and I hope this book finds its rightful audience in lovers of SFF, and damn good genre fiction. Can I dream of a high-budget screen adaptation? Yes, I can.

This is confusing and hectic and hard to follow. Those are not necessarily bad things, but there were times when I had to stop and question what had just happened. This appears to be a lot of setup to a story which has not actually begun. I can't tell if that story will be compelling or not, but I'm pretty sure it will be interesting.

This one is hard to really say something about. It unfortunately suffers from the usual things that the first book of a series does: there are a lot of characters, there is a lot of groundwork to get through, some world-building and the set-up for the main conflict. It's engaging, and I very much enjoyed the book, but it was not what I expected. And while I am definitely not disappointed, and hope to pick up the next book when it comes out, I always struggle a little with books where it feels as though it's just starting by the time you reach the last few pages.

It has a lot of representation, and being on the ace spectrum myself, having one of the main characters be asexual was such a pleasant surprise. Another thing that made me feel fondly about this story is that several of the characters work at a small SFF book store, just as I do.

This story has a lot to offer for readers of urban fantasy, with socialist leanings, the idea of revolution from the bottom up, fighting authority, abolishing capitalism, and many similar themes. The book never gets preachy, which is something I greatly appreciate. There are definitely political and (non)human rights-heavy situations and conversations happening in this story, but I never felt that it was "too much" or added in unnecessary places.

All in all, I hope the next book isn't too far away. If it keeps building on the foundation laid out in this first book, I'm sure it will be a read I'll rate higher than this one's 3.5/5.

I was lucky enough to get both eARC and Audio ARC access to No Gods, No Monsters via NetGalley and I want to thank whoever approved both! I really love having the option to experience a book both ways. I'm writing one cohesive review through Goodreads and will be submitting to the different NetGalley listings from here, so please forgive the audiobook component in the ebook/print book listing.

Monsters have always walked among us, and sometimes we get to peek behind the veil and see the truth. No Gods, No Monsters opens with a young woman named Laina getting bad news about her brother's untimely death, and jumps off from there revealing monsters left, right, and centre entangled in different lives and communities. It's weird, it's exciting, it's full of mystery, and I'm not sure what I think of it now that I've come out the other end. I don't think I get it?

I'm not sure if this was meant to be a cohesive plot or several disjointed stories, but it felt disjointed, and I kept wondering if I'd drifted off and missed something big. I think this is probably the sort of book that needs to be read slowly and carefully, not set to up for audio playback as the listener knocks out mundane tasks. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the chaotic mystery of this book and I do think it'll definitely find a strong cult following.

In terms of the audiobook recording, this is not the best. All of my audiobook apps are defaulted to 2x playbacks speed, and some books seem slow to me at that, but this one tempted me to slow it down. That means the narration is quite fast-paced and may be too fast for readers who don't normally speed up their audiobooks. On top of that, sometimes when a character other than the POV character was speaking, the narrator adopted a voice that was somewhere between Yoda and Kermit the Frog, and it was... distracting.

I actually didn't read the synopsis before starting this book, so the whole "monster-emergence" definitely caught me by surprise. I really enjoyed the writing style. Caldwell Turnbull is a new author to me and his voice feels fresh, but I found it hard to keep my concentration on the book. Though I struggled with both comprehension and pace, I made an emotional connection to Laina's brother. His drug use, mental health problems, and unresolved trauma all painted a portrait of someone in near-constant pain. I think if I were able to sit and devote ample time to read and digest this book, I may feel differently about it. I know there are lots of rave reviews. I DNF @ 22%

Man, I’m really sad about this one. I was looking forward to No Gods, No Monsters for a really long time, but unfortunately, I had to DNF at 50%. The synopsis of this book has everything you could ever want: mystery, horror, monsters, secret societies. It’s all there. But the book was lacking direction.

At 50% in, I can truly say I have no real idea of what’s going on. The storylines are constantly changing and not told in a linear order. It’s really hard to follow. There are characters coming at you left and right, and I’m spending so much time getting to know their stories, but I get to the end of the chapter and I don’t even know what I just read.

I normally give my DNFs a 1 star rating, but I think that a lot of people out there are going to love this one. I loved a good amount of things included in this book, but at the end of the day, my brain just could not wrap itself around this story. I wish it was done differently because Caldwell Trumbull really has a genius idea with this one. I would have loved to have gotten fully immersed in it. I might come back and try it again one day, but for now, 2 stars and a DNF from me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an advanced e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My rating for this book would likely be higher if I hadn't been plagued with concentration issues, and was thinking I should hold off reviewing until a re-read, but I'm way behind on my TBR. I'm still confused about a few things in the narrative, but those will hopefully be resolved in subsequent books, which I'm definitely looking forward to.

In one of the most unique approaches to the monster story, readers catch a glimpse into secret safe space meetings, government cover ups, and online discourse surrounding the existence of “monsters” as well as how the paranoia and hysteria that comes with it affects marginalized communities as a result of their exposure.

With multiple storylines and characters surrounding various events, overlapping and separating, we jump throughout the general timeline of pre and post-exposure of monsters via police body cam footage.

We explore the secret world of magical creatures living among humans and their growing desire for equity through protest-planning and safe havens. We also see new layers of themes surrounding “passing privilege” and how it applies to these magical “monsters”.

It’s an interesting writing style and pacing that took some getting used to at first, but watching all the ties between storyline and characters be revealed slowly over time was fascinating to see.

Monsters are coming out. They've always been among us, but they're revealing themselves to plain humans and it is not going well.
Are we really surprised ? No.
The question ,though, is : Why now ?
Centuries on end, Monsters have stayed hidden. Blend into society. Avoiding humanity and now, something has forced them out.
This first book is wonderful. It opens so many door and gives glimpses of so many culture at once. Cadwell Turnbull shows, with his monster, the melting pot of culture that America really is and most of the times tries to hide. So I loved the winks given to all the cultures, their legends and stories. I also loved the intersectionnality. A lot of representation of POC and LBTQ+ community !

Besides, the writing is fascinating. We have one point of view, a narrator who seems to be able to travel and be able to spy on each characters. So we see what they know, throught his eyes, what each of them know. We have vague idea of what is happening. We have hints of something big, something amazing going. And it itches. It itches because we want to know more, to find out.

So to some people it may be a bit confusing. It was for me, I just put up with it, because the writing is beautiful, the characters are interesting (altough equally confusing at times.) and also because I know it is the first in a new series and honestly, I am ready for more. Because as I said, I feel like ... There is something huge coming. So ... at the end of the series, I better feel drained and complete, because this what this first book opens for me.

I was excited about this book, but it fell flat for me. The book skipped around a lot and I was often very confused as to what was happening. It was hard to keep the stories and characters straight.. I wanted to like this book and I think others will definitely enjoy it, but it just wasn't for me.

Thank you to Blackstone a publishing and Netgalley for my gifted copy of No Gods, No Monsters.

This book has all of the things I love in it. Werewolves, supernatural beings, warring secret societies, LGBTQIA+ rep, BIPOC rep, people fighting for justice, Folklore and more.

I know without a shadow of a doubt that I probably wasn’t quite smart enough to understand this book. The characters are introduced on the fly, the POV changes frequently with no warning, there’s an omniscient narrator of sorts that appears and disrupts scenes you didn’t know they were present for. All in all, I spent most of the book confused.

There are elements of horror, magic and urban fantasy all mixed with a modern sense of oppression and violence made worse by social media. This book touches on countless ways that people can be hurt and characters that have survived some of the worst things that can happen to a person. The whiplash narration style just lost me a lot. I couldn’t keep up and it’s all quite bleak.

Overall, I wanted to love this book because of the characters, the supernatural and the message but I just couldn’t keep up. 2.5 stars ⭐️

I’m writing this immediately after finishing it so if this runs incoherent at tines it’s because I’m still trying to process and digest what I just read.

Like a mash up of NK Jemisin, Neil Gaimen, and maybe, I don’t know, an X-men origin story, Cadwell Turnbull’s latest novel is both fascinating and frustrating at turns, confusing and ambitious with one of the most diverse collection of characters I’ve read in a while. Here’s what you need to know going in: There are no easy answers here, and as this is the first book in a planned series much of this feels like a set up for what’s to come. -Although what that is I can’t completely define.

The story starts with the all too familiar video of a young black man being shot be a policeman and the dash cam recording the whole thing. The catch is moments before the victim had been a Werewolf and only was revealed to be a human, after he was killed. The incident, referred to hereafter as ‘the fracture’ defines the moment when the general population becomes aware of the existence of monsters.
Soon we’re chapter jumping with a host of characters who all have compelling stories, but the time spent with each is so short relative to the whole book I had a hard time really connecting. There’s Laina, a bisexual woman married to Ridley, her asexual trans husband, and Laina’s girlfriend Rebecca.
There's a young boy who in reality is a dragon named appropriately, Dragon who is rescued from a horrific life of ritualistically sacrificing people to a cult like organization. There’s a book collective and a host of characters who belong to that, an omnipresent narrator who observes more than participates and a senator who can morph into a dog and her sister who is invisible and lives off her siblings blood. Phew.

Turnball is ambitiously playing with ideas of outcasts and others, race and classism while pitting warring mysterious factions against each other and it’s hard at this point to know who is actually good and who is bad. I’m sure much of this will be revealed in the next installment, but I personally found, while it was all accessible and at times compelling storytelling there was too much by the end that just left me both confused and hanging form the proverbial cliff. This is a book that would benefit from a buddy read or a group chat to sort through the forest, and if any of you have read or are planning to I would love to get your thoughts.

This book absolutely blew me away. On the surface, it is an urban fantasy with light horror elements about humanity realizing monsters exist. But anyone who picks this up expecting a typical urban fantasy might be put off by what they actually will get.

Similar to Turnbull's debut novel, The Lesson, No Gods, No Monsters is more of a literary speculative fiction. There is a wide cast of characters who's connections slowly start to form to a larger story, and there is more of a focus on word choice and theming than plot. Also similar to The Lesson, the themes in No Gods, No Monsters are not being hidden. The monsters are very clearly a stand-in for other marginalized groups and there were some pretty timely messages about misinformation and the way society reacts to information it doesn't like. For example this response when a main character asks a friend they are a monster denier:

"Okay. You know about flat-earthers, right? Don't get me wrong, I know the earth is round. But I can empathize with the desire to hold things firm in your own hands. I've seen monsters the same way I've seen pictures of space. It makes sense to leave some room for doubt, to be uncertain."

It's hard to say much more about the book, as the beauty of it is unraveling the details as you read, but I think if the reader goes in with the right expectations, they will love this. The prose is sparse and hauntingly beautiful at times. The cast of characters got confusing but never so muddled that I lost trust in Turnbull knowing what he's doing. I hate to use the word enjoyable because the content of this book is incredibly heavy, with content warnings for police brutality, sexual assault, drug addiction, overdose, and more, but I loved watching the layers of this story unfold.

Also nestled in the acknowledgements, Turnbull states that references to The Lesson in this novel are meaningful so you can bet that I will be rereading both The Lesson and No Gods, No Monsters with my highlighter and tabs readily available before the sequel comes out.

This unusual literary urban fantasy novel is about more than the paranormal ‘monsters’ living hidden in the human world. It’s a metaphor for minorities of all types who want to be seen and heard. The monsters are representative not only of all types of paranormal creatures from shape shifters to witches, seers, vampires and even a dragon and but also of all colours, races and genders.

It’s a difficult book to read if you’re looking for a tightly woven plot. Instead, it’s a patchwork of snapshots loosely tied together by the characters and their stories. There are a lot of characters and I did find it difficult to sort out their relationships and connections until about half way through the book when the plot started to gel. The novel is partly written in first person, by an unknown narrator and partly in third person and also jumps from past to present adding to the complexity of the novel. However, the prose is beautiful and the best way to read it is to immerse yourself in the writing, be patient and let the meaning sneak up on you. It’s also a novel that would benefit from a second reading as I feel there is a lot more to unpack than I appreciated the first time through.

I hate to say it, but I DNFed this book. I got about a third of the way through and realized I had absolutely no idea what was going on, and I couldn’t keep track of the characters. Everything was just so vague, and I was baffled by the anonymous first person narrator. Perhaps it was a case of right book, wrong time — this seems to be a very complex novel that requires a lot of attention and focus.

Reading the blurb on this book, I was intrigued enough to give it a try. I started it, and it didn’t take me long to be a little confused. The writing was very different than I’ve read before, not that that is a bad thing. It is very lyrical and descriptive, and the author has a unique voice. I continued reading, and I did become less confused as the book went on and more used to the writing. At times, this book has an eerie tone to it, which I did love. However, I never really connected to the characters or come to really care about what happens to them as it seemed I never quite understood what was going on exactly. Just a little bit more connections to the characters and understanding them would have helped. That’s too bad because I think I would have loved this book with a little more explanation especially since the representation in the book is great, and maybe a little bit more diving into the fantasy aspects. This isn’t for me because while it’s sort of urban fantasy, it’s more about social injustice. This would be good for others, though.

No Gods, No Monsters (The Convergence Saga: Book 1) by Cadwell Turnbull

Cadwell Turnbull's second book is beautifully written and keeps you turning the pages to find out what happens next and to figure out what the heck is going on. There are multiple storylines, multiple types of monsters, multiple universes, and many, many characters. It can be confusing and at times seems like a big ball of confusion. In the end though, Turnbull has gotten us to the point where we understand much of what has happened, leaving just enough unexplained to set us up for the next book in this new series.

The book is written almost as a flow of consciousness. One thing does seem to easily follow another, though understanding how they are all connected will take patience on the part of the reader. Some may find it a bit of a mess, but I stuck with it and was rewarded to see that there are indeed layers being peeled back slowly.

On second thought, "stuck with it" is a bit harsh. It's so well written that it wasn't a chore at all to keep reading. Just the opposite in fact - I almost couldn't put it down. Yes it was frustrating as one thing built on top of another without, at first, obvious connections. How exactly the first person narrator fits into the rest of the story is probably the most frustrating part, and is one of the last layers revealed. Even given all that I really enjoyed the ride and am looking forward to seeing what Book 2 will bring.

I also enjoyed how Turnbull mixed real characters and real world ideas into the story, and loved how he used them to ground his fantastical ideas.

One last thing - buried in the credits at the end of the book the author says "the references to The Lesson [his first book] are meaningful." I haven't read The Lesson but now I may have to go back and pick it up to see what he's talking about.

I highly recommend No Gods, No Monsters for fans of science fiction and fantasy, especially those drawn to stories of monsters and magic. I rate this book Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐.

NOTE: I received this book through Netgalley and Blackstone Publishing in exchange for a fair and honest review.