Amadan na Briona

This was a good first novel. I liked Yeine and the situation the author put her in -- a "barbarian" from a backwater kingdom suddenly thrown into imperial politics where she's way over her head, but soon finds herself with unlikely allies in the enslaved gods who are the source of the ruling family's power. The gods, also, were well portrayed. They acted like gods... capricious, cruel and kind by turns, sometimes cosmic and unfathomable, sometimes petulant and very human.

I guessed the first major twist pretty early on, and while I wasn't sure exactly what would happen in the finale, I had a general idea and was not really surprised by it.

What keeps me from giving it five stars was the fact that most of the villainous characters were flat and cliched, and there was some rough writing that felt a bit amateurish. (The constant asides from Yeine, as she narrates the story but keeps having internal conversations with herself/someone else, were distracting and didn't really add anything to the story.)