I came to The Gods Time Forgot via NetGalley, lured by the promise of Irish war goddesses and warriors. The mythology is frustratingly thin on the ground.
What you get instead is a lot of Gilded Age New York social maneuvering — and to be fair, I can see what Gonzalez was going for, using the rigid constraints on wealthy women as a parallel to the shifting alliances and power struggles of the mythological source material. It's a reasonable idea. But the execution buries it. Roughly 20% of this novel is outfit description. Twenty percent. That's pages and pages that could have gone to actual plot, actual magic, actual Irish mythology.
The central romance is similarly elusive. By the end I was genuinely uncertain whether the main characters had sex or just got naked in a library together. The whole book has that quality — gesturing toward passion and danger without quite committing to either. Honestly, the Gilded Age setting and the watered-down stakes would have worked just as well with a schoolteacher and a construction worker as leads; the aristocratic trappings feel like decoration rather than necessity.
Read it as YA and you'll have a better time.
REVIEW:The Gods Time Forgot by Kelsie Sheridan Gonzalez
RATING: 2-stars
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