Your Land of Urban Fantasy

Empress, the first book in Karen Miller’s Godspeaker urban fantasy trilogy, has inspired a lot of controversy. Miller breathes life into a highly complex and extremely unlikable protagonist. It’s an extraordinary story of a woman who is born into abject poverty but is destined to become an empress and a blood thirsty conqueror.

Hekat is a she-brat, raised in a village in Mijak where a woman’s only purpose is to breed males. Her abusive father sells her to a pair of well-to-do merchants who take her to Et-Raklion and teach her to read and write. They tell her she is precious and beautiful, god touched. Hekat feels loved for the first time in her life. When she finds out that she’s actually a slave and they intend to sell her as a concubine, she vows to serve no man. She pledges herself to the God and runs away, scarring her face so no one will take advantage of her beauty again. She joins the warhost and becomes a warrior for Raklion, the warlord of the province. Eventually she becomes the wife of the warlord and bears two sons, Zandakar and Dmitrak. Both boys have different fathers and neither one is Raklion’s.

Hekat is fierce and determined and follows the god implicitly. But her scorpion god is blood thirsty and violent. The Godspeakers perform ritual sacrifice and they are the only ones who can hear the God, except for Hekat. When her sons are trained she sends them across the empire to spread the message of their god and they slaughter and conquer everything in their path.

This is a violent society where religion rules everything and the heroine rises to become a barbarian warlord who wants to rule the world. Although Hekat is a sympathetic child in the beginning of the story, she quickly progresses into a despicable sociopath, driven by her God and her traumatic past.

This is not an easy read; it’s a dark and disturbing world albeit a fascinating one. In book one Miller does an excellent job describing the barbarian invaders from the villain’s viewpoint. The scene is set for a confrontation between Mijak and another kingdom that will take place in “The Riven Kingdom” and “The Hammer of God.”

It’s not a book for the squeamish or those who like happy endings. If you can get past the brutality of the main character and her society, then you will enjoy the world building, the intricately constructed religion and the complex characters.

Publisher: Orbit
ISBN: 978-0-316-00835-8
Pages: 752