I loved the setting and story. David Mogo is a demigod in Lagos ten years after gods have fallen and destroyed their normal society. The deities and actual story had a lot of promise. It's split into three novella like stories and the first was interesting and exciting enough to keep me reading. unfortunately I feel like the execution of the book didn't match the premise and it gets more and more apparent as the book goes on. The pace completely stops in places and the characters personalities seem to switch up between scenes. It's still an interesting story in an intriguing setting that I enjoyed reading but it wasn't what I hoped.

I really liked the premise of this story but sadly, it didn't grip me as much as I wanted.

Bit of a confusing start, jumps right into the story without giving the reader enough background to be invested.

Literally describes 'Naruto running' in it.

I enjoy the idea behind the story but find the flow difficult.

Godhunters biggest problem is that Suyi D. Okungbowais is an overacheiver - it's full of great fantasy and dark whim, but the overall narrative is bloated and schlocky, leaving it to whimper in the shadows of its contemporaries.

But it gets off to such a strong start. The setting alone deserves praise. Gone are the constraints of the Western world that make many similar titles so vapid and cookie cutter, Okungbowais draws from his own surroundings, formulating a fictionalised version of Nigeria that's both enthralling and under condensed.

The characters too are likable, and the storyline itself is strong. David Mago is a Godhunter, getting by in the dark underbelly of Lagos, when he accidentally unleashes an army of hybrid monsters who create chaos on the streets of Nigeria. He decides to put his wrongs right, and with the help of a ragtag group of heroes he takes this high fantasy into previously untouched territory.

But for all its genuine charm and enjoyable elements, the biggest problem with David Mogo: Godhunter is it concerns itself with the bits and bobs too much, distracting the important narrative movements with stuffy, overbearing facts. Especially in the books latter acts, there's too much bloat and too little focus.

It's wonderful, interesting setting can't help keep Godhunter afloat. There's too much going on and not enough breathing space for the good stuff, and ultimately, it makes it a disappointing venture.

I enjoyed this immensely. I’m a huge fan of The Dresden Files and so when I saw that this book was being described as something similar, but set in Nigeria with a whole new mythos to explore, my expectations were set high. David Mogo did not disappoint.

In particular, I love how the author uses First Person point of view in this book. David’s voice was smart and quick, funny and authentic, and fun to follow through every twist and turn. His way of seeing and describing things kept me reading throughout every crazy godling and plot twist he encountered.

The language in the book is another unique but somehow fascinating choice. It was a challenge to understand what he or other characters were saying to each other at first, but I grew accustomed to it as I read more and appreciate the authenticity that the author tried so hard to bring to the story.

I love this genre and I believe that David Mogo, Godhunter is an extremely promising debut novel for Okungbowa. While heavy on the exposition at times, it makes up for any freshman flaws with a detailed and beautifully built world and quick, funny action. More than anything it was fun to read, and I will definitely be looking out for more from this author in the future.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book. The story was interesting and I love the characters and fantasy world that the author created. I really liked the premise, and I thought it was written well, but it wasn't quite a home run for me. But I still enjoyed it and will look for more work by this author.

I just finished reading Suyi Davies Okungbowa's <i>David Mogo, Godhunter</i>. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to read this book prior to its publication. I want to thank the publisher for this opportunity, but my review of this book is not impacted by their generosity.

The book centers around David Mogo who is half-god and half-human. The story centers in Lagos where a bunch of Gods have fallen to earth and are causing a lot of chaos. David starts out the story as a godling hunter. Basically, he helps people get rid of the godlings for money when they've gotten into parts of Lagos where they really shouldn't be. Through a series of events, David's world turns upside down and he's forced to reconcile who he is versus who he wants to be.

As a whole, I really enjoyed this book. I found the writing very easy to follow. The pacing of the book was really good and kept me reading. Although the book didn't necessarily leave itself open to a sequel, I definitely could see how a sequel could be possible. One of the things I really enjoyed was the level of detail Okungbowa puts into the creation of the world where Mogo exists. From a worldbuilding perspective, I found myself enthralled by the world he created and really enjoyed meeting the various characters. One of my only problems was that there are a lot of characters in this book, so keeping track of who is who at times was a bit difficult (also, some have multiple names). If you read this book, I would recommend keeping a list just so you don't have to worry about this minor issue.

If you're looking for an interesting read, I would highly recommend this book.

DNF'd @ 35%

The concept of this book absolutely reeled me in from the get go. Unfortunately though the actual execution of the story didn't work for me. There's way too much tell and infodumps that it bogs everything and loses its forward momentum - and my interest. Thanks anyway, NetGalley.

David Mogo, Godhunter is an interesting own voices fantasy novel set in our world, that with a bit of extra attention could have been great. Instead it flies just short of falling flat.

I was quite honestly very excited for this book. I mean it is an own voices book when it comes down to the culture. Lagos, Nigeria is where the author comes from and just that alone is something that sets this book apart. Another thing that I think will appeal to a lot of people is that there is basically no romance in here.

But the book didn’t quite build up as I expected it to be. Essentially this book is set up in 3 parts that felt more like 3 novella’s due to the time jumps and arcs between them. Especially between part 1 and 2 which was six months. It meant that each part had to wrap its ‘arc’ up action and plot wise. It left not as much room for world building as I would have liked to have seen. In the first part there was room to capture the feel of Lagos and how the Falling (the big event that happened before the book starts) affected the city. It made this first part so much more appealing to me.

Part 2 and part 3 were more focused on a bigger plot and the journey to finding oneself in being a demigod. Set between humans and gods. There was less room for world building and the things that I thought would be expanded on. More on the Gods, the Island and Odon, got left behind. That could have been okay had the journey to finding oneself not been as boring and unnecessary. Or some scenes were in any case like a scene where he got called out for showing his anger once and all of sudden he was losing credibility with everyone. Just things like that, that didn’t make sense in the grand scheme of what the author seemed to want to do here.

It is written in a first person present point of view. Again the first part, David’s voice was incredibly strong. I liked him. But I felt we lost a lot in the second and third part. I feel like we lost a lot to him repeating himself. Even so I did still like him for the most part. I also liked his relationship with his adopted father. An interesting thing here is code-switching which is switching between two or more languages within one conversation which is what happened often in speaking between these two. However it took some getting used to as it isn’t quite so easy to figure out what they are saying. Sometimes I don’t think I actually caught the meaning.

Another character I found interesting was Fati, a teenage girl David rescues from an adult wizard meaning to marry her. She comes to live with him and his adopted father. She is speech-impaired. I wish there had been more room for her personality to expand. Much of her time on the page is spend with others talking (who inhabit her at some point) and not so much coming from herself. I also dislike that at the end she was ‘cured’.

Having said that, if you are looking for an African fantasy and are prepared to go into this novella set up I think one can really enjoy this. I think this author does have some great ideas and I can’t wait to see what he will come up with in the future.

2.5 / 5 ✪

David Mogo: Godhunter is a study in contrast. Looking back on it, there were so many things that annoyed me about it and yet I still can’t bring myself to give it a bad rating. That said, I did lower my initial rating due to the sheer amount of said annoyances and the fact that they did not sit well. The fact is, DM:G does just enough right to make up for its generally mediocre plot, confusing explanations, horrible inconsistency and just odd, uneven pacing.

First off, DM:G isn’t really one full story. I mean… it’s a series of connected, consecutive events, divided into three parts: Godhunter, Firebringer, and Warmonger. Firebringer is set 6 months after the events of Godhunter. The first chapter of it sets up something completely different only to immediately ditch it in the second and continue with the overarching story. It’s such a departure that it throws off whatever flow the plot had established before. The 2nd and 3rd parts seem much more whole, as Warmonger is set only 10 days after Firebringer.

Godhunter opens with David Mogo and a potential client negotiating a job.

As you might have guessed, David Mogo is a god hunter. Something made necessary by the events of the Falling, where the gods were ejected from their plane and forced upon our own. For the most part, David hunts godlings; those lesser entities that have lost their way and made homes in people’s gardens, garages and trees. Upon capture, he looses them on the outskirts of Lagos, where they’ll stay out of trouble. He does not mess with High gods, nor capture anything. And yet, this is exactly what the client is after. Ajala is a local Baále—like a clan chieftain, or duke—and a wizard to boot. And he’s after a pair of high gods (twins), to be captured and delivered to him, no questions asked.

David Mogo initially refuses, but ultimately ends up taking the job.

And that’s where the trouble begins.

For not only is Ajala a renowned wizard attempting to use the gods’ power to overthrow the government’s rule, he’s also but a puppet for some shadowy force, some even greater power. And it falls to David to defeat not only Ajala, but the Baále’s masters as well.

The setting and world-building of DM:G alone is reason enough to read it. Set in Lagos, Nigeria, even at the start of the book I was already outside the realm of urban fantasy I’m used to. Even though the story never leaves the city—only hinting at the country, the continent beyond—the setting never feels crowded and is always refreshing and interesting. Even though Warmonger is set in a comparatively drab locale, it gets by through intermittent side-trips to nearby, vibrant locations.

There were several terms in DM:G I had to look up; I’m not terribly familiar with African folklore, terms, or Nigeria specifically. For the most part, none of these had a satisfactory English translation (not every word translates well, after all—it’s like how Inuit has so many words that all translate to just ‘snow’ in English) so when there’s a word like that, I’ve no issue with it being rendered in another language. The main issue I did have concerned the dialogue. In the text, it was billed as English, but was really some kinda pidgin (a hybridization between two languages). I could catch the meaning of the general conversations from context, and the fact that a lot of English words were involved. A lot of the dialogue was just filler, or greetings, or banal stuff, so it didn’t matter. At first, even, the pidgin made it feel more authentic, more Nigerian. When it got into backstory, insight, or anything technical or spiritual—I often had no clue. There was one bit in particular where Papa Udi was set to drop some bombshell regarding his history with another character, and the resulting conversation was so incomprehensible that I swore at the book and had to resist the urge to throw it at the wall (never a good idea when reading an ebook).

There’s more than a bit of stutter in the story; just ODD pacing, all over the place. Though it’s especially bad on the lead up to the epic conclusion. And yet, the conclusion is so epic I found myself not caring over the build-up.

There are so many important details that are never mentioned, it’s kind of amazing. I actually had to edit my review down quite a bit, as there wasn’t room to complain about everything that annoyed me. So I’ll just list a few here. Lack of explanation; lack of backstory; realism in rights, acceptance, homophobia, to name a few; consistency; characters, settings, story items that are introduced and immediately abandoned (not killed off, just never mentioned again); the execution of so many things.

DM:G is so obviously a debut novel. It is riddled with annoyances, missteps, even flat-out mistakes that the author might not have ever considered. It’s well-written, language-wise. Just not so much, plot-wise. And yet, there is a certain charm to it. For the amount it tries and fails, there is are a number of occasions where it tries something new and succeeds. At no time did I find it unreadable, unpalatable, or awful. Most often, there was something annoying, frustrating, or inconsistent. Now, it’s entirely possible you might find one (or all) of its flaws unacceptable. But there’s also a chance you’ll find one of its triumphs ingratiating. And another chance you’ll be just as flummoxed as I am trying to rate it. For, if David Mogo: Godhunter did one thing truly well, it got my attention. I’ll be anticipating more from Suyi Davies Okungbowa—and I’m sure his work will improve with experience and time.

FYI- The cover is AMAZING. Dunno who did it, but it’s just incredible.

https://arefugefromlife.wordpress.com/2019/06/18/book-review-david-mogo-godhunter-by-suyi-davies-okungbowa/

From the first few words of David Mogo, Godhunter you know it's going to be magical and captivating. A post-apocalyptic Lagos wherein the gods have fallen and roam amongst us and we meet David, our hero, who takes on the job to capture them for a fee. David finds himself battling against two gods he has crossed and throughout the story discovering about his own identity as a demigod. The cast of supporting characters ranges from his mother, Papa Udi his mentor, teacher and like a father figure, gods that he helps but help him along the way like Taiwo, Kehinde. Most of all what I loved about this book is how unapologetically Nigerian and African it was, I loved the code switching, I loved the little tidbits about Nigerian culture we got, about how people react and how people are. This book took me on a journey that was compelling and engaging. I can't say enough about the worldbuilding and this book.

I'm grateful that speculative Nigeria seems to be showing up on UK and US bookshelves - and on my personal TBR - more and more often recently. Not long after my experience with (the very different) The Half-God of Rainfall, Suyi Davies Okungbowa's debut brought me back to the world of Orisha and their dealings with mortals - and those whose identities lie somewhere between the two.

Speaking of things being in-between: Okungbowa's novel actually fits somewhere in the space between being a single story and a set of three interlinked novellas, and while I haven't tracked down its writing history, there's hints - particularly in the opening of the third section - that it was written as the latter before becoming a novel. Normally main characters don't feel the need to reintroduce themselves to the audience at a novel's two-thirds mark, is all I'm saying. It lends itself to an unorthodox tension structure, with three distinct climaxes, but weirdness and very occasional repetition aside, it works well as a single volume, largely due to the driving force of the main character's development, which definitely benefits from being told in a single narrative, regardless of the episodic nature of what happens around it.

That main character, it will not surprise you to hear, is David Mogo, Godhunter. David lives in a version of Lagos which has been subjected to the Falling: a war which has caused thousands of Orisha to rain down on the city and take up residence. A half-god himself, David was abandoned by his mother and raised by a foster-father who also happens to be a wizard, wielding magical talents which David's divinity keeps him from using in the same way. Instead, when we meet David he's trying to throw himself into a bounty hunting existence with as much amoral abandon as possible, taking on a job from far more shady wizard Ajala for "roof money" while trying to suppress the sense that he should be acting with slightly more principle. Tasked with capturing twin gods for Ajala, David's job goes horribly wrong when the second twin, Kehinde lets him in on the realities of what his employer is trying to achieve, and he instead teams up with her, his foster-father and a teenage girl called Fatoumata to try and take him - and the Orisha Aganju, who might just have gotten them all into this mess in the first place - down. Parts two and three of the story skip ahead to deal with the fallout from those first events and to dive deeper into the world's mythological underpinnings while steadily increasing the stakes (and body counts) for each subsequent showdown.

Okungbowa's version of Lagos is positively post-apocalyptic and it feels like there's a lot of horror influence in how most of the city's supernatural creatures behave: a lot of mindless minion-creatures and supernatural experiments which lead to zombie-like offensives with super high body counts and the constant threat of the heroes being overwhelmed. As the threats mount, so David and his allies end up travelling to more parts of this post-apocalyptic Lagos (which, as Okungbowa reminds us through David's narration, wasn't the most functional city to begin with), meeting absentee security forces, other gods both benevolent and antagonistic, and the folks still trying to live their lives in an increasingly unstable situation. Despite being generally well written, however, I sometimes found myself less engaged than I expected in some of the high action scenes, especially if I'd had to put down the book halfway through a "part" and then try and slot back in to the particular set of circumstances being faced. Because the tension structure is more of a "three stories in one" than a single novel, it feels like things can go from zero to one hundred very quickly (unnecessary character reintroductions notwithstanding), and with the goals and alliances regularly changing it can be hard to remember what everyone is trying to achieve at any given moment. No doubt readers who come at this as a "lazy weekend afternoon" book rather than a "half an hour at a time on the commute" book will have a different experience in that regard, but it did inhibit my enjoyment of plot elements I am already somewhat picky about.

Sitting at the centre of the first-person narrative, David is very much the driving force behind the novel even when he's being useless and selfish and self-pitying. As you'd expect, the extent to which David Mogo, Godhunter is an enjoyable story very much hinges on to what extent you're invested in his growth from a pretty unpleasant layabout to a demigod in control of his own potential. Perhaps I'm just partial to the occasional young male douchebag protagonist (looking at you, Elliott from In Other Lands) but I clicked better than I expected with his character growth particularly after the first section. Maybe it helps that he gets knocked down and roughed up a lot, and there's notes of humility and resignation in the character that temper his less savoury elements? Regardless, the result is a character who's closer to a young Peter Grant than to a stereotypical hubristic half-god, and a generally well-rounded, likeable and nuanced supporting cast who David increasingly comes to terms with caring about (and vice versa) makes his journey more satisfying. In all honesty, I think I would have been more invested in a version of the story that's heavier on the relationship development and lighter on the action, but then, that's not what this book is trying to be.

David Mogo, Godhunter is an odd thing for a single volume, but the elements are all there for a successful action adventure and it mostly turns its weirdness into an asset for the worldbuilding and character development. While it didn't click with me to the extent I'd hoped, you like your fantasy to be deity-driven, horror-tinged and action-packed, here's one that ticks all those boxes in a setting that's still criminally underrepresented in "Western" fantasy publishing. Oh, and the cover is fantastic. What more could you need?

A damn fun read. I honestly did not expect to be quite so entertained by this book. Perfect for science fiction fans.

Nigerian Godpunk is something that I think everyone needs a little more of in their life, however, I was greatly disappointed in some of the decisions that were made and the overall writing style of this book. The concept of this book is great. It's intriguing and could be great, however, the structure of this book is a problem. It's written in shorter almost episodic sections that if they had been expanded upon and developed more could have been full books in their own right. The author is well known for his short stories and it shows in this aspect. It felt like he put his short stories together into a book. But it doesn't flow. There isn't enough character development, enough shown world building, the side characters aren't used enough, the whole thing just needs to be a bit more developed. This also leads the main plot points to be told to the readers rather than shown and developed in a natural way. The villain basically lays out his plans for everyone right there on the page. No guessing of motives, or hows, or whys. It is just there.

The author does more telling than showing. This is done in large exposition dumps and inner monologue within the main characters mind. As it is told in the first person perspective, the latter happens quite a bit. But also this fills in a lot of the gaps between the short episodic moments of action and drags the whole thing down. It makes it slower than it needs to be. Also there is a large divide stylistically between the pidgin English that is used to communicate and the more "proper" English that is used as the writing style and in some other places. This is a 2.5 rounded up. Which is such a shame. I love the idea, but the execution just isn't there for me. I think it would be amazing maybe as a comic.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publishers for providing me with an ARC of this book, however, the thoughts and opinions are my own.

This is one of the most surprising book for me that I have read in quite a while. Not only provided it twists and turns in the story of the superhero who realises that he needs other people in order to succeed in his quest, it also holds an interesting and diverse cast of characters.

First of all we have David Mogo, half god half human with more than human powers but not fully divine, He sets out onto a quest to find out about and understand his godhood, the powers he has, but he also wants to set things right between the humans and the gods that have descended upon earth, more precisely onto Lagos and create havoc wherever they go. And there is Papa Udi, the wizard who took David Mogo in, when his mother left him on the wizard's doorstep many years ago.

And then there is a whole cast of characters who come in as the story unfolds. One of the things I loved most in this book is its relational character, how people bond and connect together and you have such a variety of relationships, barely ever based on the bloodline, but based on circumstances and based on choice and care and love and how you want your life and that of your community to be.

The world, respectively Lagos we encounter in this book is dystopian at least, vast parts have been laid bare by the catastrophic event of gods arriving in the human dimension and not returning to their abode. The book is fast paced. It is part urban fantasy but also more. There is a lot of fights and gore and torment in this book, don't get me wrong. But my impression is that when you put this book into one category you miss out onto the whole that it has to offer as expectations might be raised that will not be met by this book., because, possibly the best way of putting it is, that it has been written in-between various genres.

There are at least two other languages represented in this book apart from English. For one of them I got somewhat the hang of, with the other, I wouldn't understand at all, but it didn't matter as David Mogo stuck to his English and sometimes you don't have to understand the words in order to get the meaning.

This was a book that took me out of my comfort zone of Western UK and US publications of science fiction and fantasy writing, and I am so glad I got this opportunity to read this book. It is one of the most gender including books that I have come across in quite a while, where male and female meet in a balance, and mutual respect is the basis for the building of any kind of community.

And last, but definitively not least, what I am particularly happy about is, that, for once, the mother has not gone missing.

The eARC for this review was provided to me from the publishers Rebellion Publishing and Abaddon via Netgalley in return for an honest review.

The gods have fallen to Earth and the world has been irreversibly changed.

This is the story of David Mogo, a demigod who occupies his time in this post-Falling time by hunting down creatures called godlings and sending them back to the area of Lagos that has been occupied by the fallen gods. One day, he gets a proposition from a local wizard to score a lot more cash for a much more dangerous job. What happens afterwards changes David's life forever.

This book is broken into three parts, following David and the aftermath of the decisions he makes. The last two sections I enjoyed immensely! They were fast-paced, gripping, and incredibly readable. I tore through the last two parts so quickly and the ending was so satisfying. You're probably wondering why this book is only getting three stars if I liked it quite so much.

It's because of the first section. The first section just dragged for me. I couldn't connect with the characters, I couldn't connect with the story, and it just felt blah until the very end. I was close to DNFing the book before the end of the first section picked up and compelled me to read the rest. I think my main issue with the first section was that there was no depth to the characters, especially our titular character, David Mogo. He felt so flat and boring, which you would think would be hard to do with a demigod. Thankfully, he felt much more fleshed out in the subsequent sections, which is why I think I enjoyed them so much. Also, the action was better paced in the last two sections as opposed to the first, where it felt like it was all crammed in at the end.

Overall, this was an enjoyable book if you can power through the first third of it! I think it's worth it to keep going!

I love any novel that revolves around mythology and this is the case here.

Welcome to Africa, where the gods were expelled from their kingdom to end up on Earth. The gods presented in this book all come from the African mythology and I loved that. Above all, the author takes the time to explain their roles, their stories and I liked to discover this mythology which is completely new to me. In addition, the author has located his story in the heart of Central Africa and he describes lifestyles, culture which is also another asset. We are seeing more and more novels centered on North Africa but here we have something new with Central Africa and there is need to see more from this region.

David Mongo, our hero, is a demi-god who drives the gods out of his world when he can. He is willing to help the humans, but he does not always know how to do it right. He is a complex character who is in search of his story, his function in this world and he will clearly not make the right choices all the time. It's a kind of anti-hero.

As for my opinion, I really liked the universe and the plot in general. It is build in 4 large parts that revolve around the evolution of our hero. There is rhythm throughout the book and the action is present. However, what may be displeasing is the style of the author, he gave David a rather unique inner voice and I think it will not please everyone. So it's a book that I found nice, more adult than my usual reading, but sometimes it feels good.

David Mogo, Godhunter is the fantasy novel debut of Nigerian author Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Described by the author as "godpunk," the story takes place in a future (although seemingly a pretty near-future) Nigerian in which African Gods have descended onto Nigeria - and especially Lagos, and caused a massive disruption in life. The story is told in three parts; it's essentially three novellas that occur one after the other, with small time gaps in between.

The end result is....well, it's fine, but unremarkable honestly. Each of the three parts works okay as a whole, with solid plots and a solid main character, but there really aren't any developed characters other than said main character. In particular, there basically aren't any women characters of note until the final part of the book. There's certainly promise in this book's setting, but so many characters and gods are kind of interchangeable and so while the book never comes close to being bad, it never manages to stand out in any way, which is a shame.
---------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Over a decade ago, "The Falling" occurred in Nigeria - in which African gods of various pantheons fell to Earth, and those gods, godlings, etc. began to make new homes on Earth - sometimes with little regards for who exactly was in their way. In Lagos, those with money reacted by using it to secure their homes on the Upper Island, while everyone else tried desperately to survive amidst the chaos caused by the now present Gods, Wizards, and everything in between.

David Mogo is a demigod, found one day by a local wizard in Lagos and taken-in. He knows nothing about his godly mother - who she is, or even what pantheon she is - except for the occasional cryptic dreams he has of her. David makes his living as a "godhunter", using his skills and some enchanted weapons to stop godlings from causing problems in the neighborhood. It's not a glamorous life, but someone has to do it.

But when a powerful wizard, with great ambitions, asks David to hunt and capture not just godlings, but a pair of actual High Gods, he finds himself in more trouble than he could've bargained for - and with the fate of the whole city of Lagos, if not the country, in his hands. And as events continue to get more complicated - forcing David to come to grips with who he is as a demigod and what he can do - David will find that he has more to lose than he ever thought possible....and that his dangerous enemies and their divine powers threaten to cause him that loss.....
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As I mentioned above, David Mogo, Godhunter is split into three parts, Godhunter, Firebringer, and Warmonger, with each part being essentially its own complete story (part 2, Firebringer, does have a significant cliffhanger at the end, but it comes after its story is complete really). Each subsequent part expands the magical/godly nature of the conflict in the story, with the first part starting with a god-possessed villain and the third concluding with an all out massive conflict of gods on all sides.

Through it all, our story focuses on its eponymous hero, David Mogo, the demigod godhunter. David's a pretty solid if unexceptional hero as a man (well half) whose central goal is helping those he cares about - and can occasionally get led astray by those wishes. He's a man who rests his emotions on his sleeve, and his reactions to loss, anger, and betrayal are very real, if not necessarily the best possible for his own sake. Still, while he's easy to root for as a result, he has - and so do others to be fair - moments of stupidity that are kind of annoying to read, which especially show up in the book's second part and seem there only to prolong the story.

Alas, David is basically the only interesting character developed in the story. The book spends only rare moments developing the backgrounds or personalities of the other characters in the story, to the point where they often feel like blank slates - for example - our most prominent woman character is a mute teenager whose first big act is to simply exist in the right place at the right time. There are fragments of interesting potential characters here - the grizzled exiled wizard estranged from his god, the war goddess who seeks no longer to fight wars, the commander of the special forces who has to try and lead ordinary people to fight in the midst of gods - but the book just doesn't devote any time to them, to the point where significant developments in their relationships occur off screen. Hell even the antagonists don't get enough page-time, appearing mainly for their major plot moments and that's it - the main antagonist gets an interesting backstory/worldview finally in the final part...only for it to turn to nothing. And that final part introduces a number of new antagonist goddesses who get no development at all, and if I didn't have some knowledge of who a few of those goddesses were from other stories, I would've been really lost.

It's kind of a problem in a book where a big theme is the David's realization that he has come to find himself with a growing family of people he cares about, since David's relationships with those characters happen near entirely off screen. David spends a substantial time in parts 1 and 2, and even a little in part 3, on his own, and while these parts are written well, with the plot unfolding at a nice pace and in interesting ways (plot-induced stupidity in part 2 mentioned above aside), the result is that I basically never cared about the other characters David cared about.

Again, David Mogo, Godhunter has an interesting setting and the plot is never boring, so I don't want to suggest this book is bad. But the book doesn't reach a level above "fine" due to its lack of any other interesting characters other than its title protagonist. Ah well.

This book was really good. It was an unique story with an amazing worldbuilding and characters. Cover was gorgeous too. I really liked the authors writing and will definitely check his other works too.

Well. That was amazing. The first thing that told me this book was going to be right up my alley was the code-switching. Which, for those of you who don't know, is a linguistic thing where people's phrasing and grammar order etc changes between situations. It's particularly prevalent among multi-lingual cultures. I loved how Okungbowa writes Davids speech without trying to explain it. The book is unshamedly Nigerian and this is just one of the ways it does this.

Then there is the worldbuilding. Long story short, a whole bunch of gods have been thrown into the human world and this is causing some major conflict. The main character is a half-god who is something of a pest control except fr supernatural creatures wreaking havoc called godlings. I really loved how Okungbowa wrote the gods and provided an explanation for the different pantheons and how they interact. (view spoiler)

As for the characters, they paled a little in comparison to the worldbuild, and felt mmm slightly superficial? Outside of David, I never got much of a feel for other characters. We get a bit of a history on Papa Udi, but nothing much on Fatoumata or Onipede or even his mother. Part of this is perhaps because of the way the book is staged. I've seen some people say it's really three stories published as one, but it's more like three acts. And each act has a bunch of new characters introduced so the characters that show up later have less of a chance to stand out.

Ultimately, I enjoyed this novel. It's about found families and communities, it's about coming together when the world is on the verge of ending, it's about finding home where you can and the cost of greed.

Lagos, the largest city on the continent of Africa, is the site of The Falling, the day the gods took to the Earth. They have been semi-quarantined on the Island, yet lose themselves on the people on the Mainland to cause trouble. A demigod named David Mogo has made a business around helping people rid themselves of thes minor spirits. He's good at it. His godessence is strong and has been honed my his wizard mentor, Papa Udi. He's a stoic old man who has agreed to guide David through his training and provide him with his wards...

The book consists of three story arcs, you might call them separate novellas, Godhunter, Firebringer, and Warmonger. Each has David learning more about the nature of his power and the internal struggle struggle of being a demigod who is policing the gods. The first story pits him against a greedy wizard who tries to create an uprising by controlling children to do his bidding. The action is crisp and the ramp up is pretty tight.

This piece of Nigerian urban fantasy is overall a good read. The pacing is a bit off in places as the author gives up information too quickly. Even though I liked the world and David's voice, there could has been some nuance to the storytelling. And unfortunately, it seemed the organization of each novella was too similar.

There are several parts of those info dumps that I did like. For example, the recipe and procedure to create the wards was pretty cool. I could see them measuring, stirring, and boiling that wicked stuff in preparation of taking on the kiddie zombies.

Overall, David Mogo: Godhunter has many things I like in a book: a distinct mythos, an engaging main character, and a good mentor relationship, but the storytelling was garbled and at times repetitive.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley, Rebellion Press, and the author for an advanced copy for review.