A review by ohmage_resistance
The Last Fang of God by Ryan Kirk

adventurous medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
  • A father and daughter in a Norse inspired setting go on a journey so that the girl can complete a ritual or else she dies.
  • I didn’t really like this one very much. Ultimately, I was pretty disappointed in it because it felt very generic. For me, when I read self published books, I typically want to see something that traditionally published books can’t provide. This can be representation or a subgenre or complex themes that mainstream media doesn’t really deal with much because trad published books are meant for as general of an audience as publishers can manage. And for me, having these more unique elements makes up for the tradeoff in not having a full team of people polishing and editing the book. I’d rather see an interesting idea not executed 100% perfectly than a perfectly executed generic idea, especially in self published books. The Last Fang of God was relatively good at what it was trying to do (although it could have used some polishing), I just didn’t find really any compelling ideas in it.
  • The worldbuilding in this one was pretty generic—you have a variety of different animal themed clans in a vaguely Norse inspired setting. The author did try to make it somewhat gender egalitarian by having some female warriors, but I found this element to be really inconsistent. The central relationship between father and daughter is very much reflective of modern gender roles, and there’s so many other examples (female lead is an archer because close combat is too violent for her, apparently; women are associated with family and healing; men being motivated by protecting their wives; a man describing his sons as “terrors” but his daughter as “too good for this world”; I could go on). All of those elements I wouldn’t expect in the gender egalitarian society it seems like the author was going for. It just felt super inconsistent on a cultural worldbuilding level.
  • Sascha, the female lead, is written like an adult man’s idea of what a stereotypical teenage girl is like. She and her father Kalen had the most generic arc you could think of for a father-daughter relationship (
    Girl needs to realize her dad isn’t perfect but loves her and is doing his best, dad needs to realize his daughter is growing up and wants more independence
    ) . I also thought the narrative tended to be way more sympathetic to Kalen than to Sascha which was odd because I was generally was feeling the opposite. For example, Kalen would just not tell Sascha things for no good reason multiple times, and then side characters would pop up when Sascha got mad to defend him. There would be zero accountability, but it’s ok because Kalen feels bad about it, apparently? I also found the way this book treated the themes of temper and suicide to be in rather poorly handled (suicide was treated pretty casually and Sascha getting mad and storming off was treated like a sign of immaturity but Kalen showing a temper was not ideal but fine as long as he was never violent towards innocents. Which was particularly annoying considering I was reading Dreadnought at the same time and it has some great depictions of verbal but not physical abuse and this book didn’t even recognize that this is a thing.)
  • I can see people who just want a travel and fighting heavy story without thinking about the themes too hard liking this one, I just got bored, and when I get bored apparently I overanalyze things.

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