I received an e-ARC of this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review.
I had originally considered giving this a 3.5 out of 5, but a little extra thought convinced me to bump it up to the full four stars.
Godstorm is a dual timeline novel, following the main character as an adult and in some parts as a child as she navigates life in what I believe was 16th century Roman Empire London. It's extremely alternative history, which felt a little bit hodge podge at times, and the way that timeline switches were labelled in Roman numerals didn't really work for me. I understand there's a theme going on, but it was still a little bit mentally jarring having to take a moment to figure out if a time jump was because we were revisiting the main character's childhood, or because a time skip had occurred in the main timeline. I can semi-confidently parse Roman numerals, but it was still distracting.
The plotline and politics were overall intriguing, although I'm not 100% convinced about Barrow's plot arc towards the end of the book and some of the character arc clues were a little bit cliched, but Arrow kinda gave me Xena: Warrior Princess vibes, and that's pretty cool. Hopefully a sequel is in the offing.