The sequel to Dawn of Humanity (our review here), Rise of the Humanaki picks up where the first book ended. Olympus is been taken by Chronos and the Titans now rule the world. They see Rhea and her likes as abominations. The humanaki are either taken as slaves or killed mercilessly. Rhea who escaped on a ship is taken prisoner and brought to Chronos to deal with. Chronos takes Rhea as a consort and later Rea finds herself implanted with his babies thereby birthing Hestia, Athena, Demeter, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, and Zeus over the spans of decades.
Rhea gets a more powerful and important role in the first half where she carefully escapes Chronos and the Titans for the better part of her life as a consort to Chronos. Zeus is prophesied to be the one to end the rule of the Titans and protecting him until he comes of age is the top priority for Rhea who reunited with his mother, Gaia, and leaves Zeus under her protection.
The story starts a little slow and it takes me some 50-60 pages to finally get into the narrative even though I re-read the first book before picking this up. While the first book follows gods and people, it is the second book that finally gets into the core of Greek Mythology as known to the public. The character feels familiar and as the story is written with interesting twists, it feels like seeing the story through a refreshing new lens. Although a lot of Greek Gods make an appearance in the sequel a lot of chapters in the second half is dedicated to Zeus and Poseidon.
Few of the characters from the first book still take on important roles but they take supporting roles giving the characters space to thrive and I love how the author has transitioned them into supportive roles without distracting us from the plot.
There is a lot of hand-to-hand combat and other action sequences where a lot of times the Humanakis find themselves in fight arenas fighting for their lives and the author has done a good job of describing the fights. In my personal opinion writing action scenes is much harder than filming them because you are trying to get your readers to imagine each move through words and it mostly doesn’t work for me. However, I had no such problem with those in this series.
One of the major drawbacks of the book which was even a problem with me during the first one is time jumps. I understand that the characters are gods who live for centuries so time jumps are logical unless you want the books to get unnecessarily long and boring. So time jumps can’t be avoided, however, not mentioning them, was confusing at times.
The other drawback was the number of characters. Even the characters that are not relevant and merely mentioned in passing are named which only adds to the list of characters. There are a lot of characters at different places one already needs to keep track of.
While the first book reminded me of ‘The 100’ in terms of vibes, this book sets out on his path with Rhea’s children trying to free the world from the grip of the Titans. Rise of the Humanaki has tons of characters with amazing build and although the focus shifts to Zeus, Rhea still has her battles to fight. I loved how strong and resilient she is even in the face of constant abuse and disgrace. My impression of the Greek gods especially, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades through the stories I have read is of sharp, cunning Gods who fought for power, so seeing them as kind and easily getting along with each other was surprising. That’s how this retelling differs from the usual retelling of the mythology.
The Rise of Humanaki with its first book is defiantly, and definitely worth picking up. The author manages to get all these powerful characters together in a really interesting form and makes for a good sci-fi/fantasy read with powerful characters and a narrative that flows smoothly.
Pros:
- Well-developed plot with strong characters and exciting scenes that manage to hold your attention.
- Well-written fight scenes and an interesting take on Greek Gods.
- Amazing world-building
Cons:
- Time jumps without any mentions and too many characters.
Cover Score: 8.0/10
Book Score: 8.2/10
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Review by Akansha, her services are available here.
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