Review: The Bottom Rung (In The Lap Of The Gods Series Book 1) by Sam Hall

The Bottom Rung by Sam Hall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Didn’t Quite Hit The Spot

Sometimes you can get really excited a book because of the blurb and the really cool cover. Sometimes you can start reading and think ‘ok this is interesting’. Sometimes those books don’t quite deliver and this is the most disappointing thing in the world.

I really *really* wanted to love this book. It has so many of my favourite ingredients for a book; reverse harem, vampires, witches, werewolves, suppressed minority with evil overlord, plucky underpowered MFC and so on. The main problem is that ingredients don’t quite mesh properly. The author was concentrating so hard on the world building that she didn’t pay enough attention to the characters.

Lethe is an albino (which is a supernatural race with very few powers). Albinos usually end up as food and sexual slaves for vampires, but she has managed to stay free of that pitfall by becoming a courier. She is also protected somewhat by her childhood friends/first loves, Gavin and Bennett, who were human but decided to become vampires, supposedly to protect Lethe.

Albinos are controlled by the humans with drugs and most are addicts. Lethe managed to get off the drugs but her ‘brother’ Marley did not. She supports him, despite his all consuming addiction. I think we are supposed to see her as self-sacrificing and loyal for this support. She also wants Gavin and Bennett to be human again. She rejects them romantically but still relies on them for their blood to make her strong enough to survive The Quarter.

Essentially, I didn’t like Lethe. It seemed like her feelings were the only important thing to her. She kept jumping into situations without thinking through the consequences, not only for herself, but for everyone around her.

There was plenty of steam in the book, but the romance was lacking. If romance is what you look for in an RH book, this is probably not for you.

I felt like the world building was overwhelming. So much information was thrown at the reader early on, but not really expanded on. This left great big holes in my comprehension. Every time I thought I might get a handle on what was happening, something else was thrown at me and I was left struggling to build something from the strands of spaghetti that was the world building and plot. I felt like the author was trying to create an epic fantasy saga but squash it into a regular sized book.

There is a lot of promise in this author’s work, but I just don’t think that this work lives up to it, and that’s a shame.

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