The Gutter Prayer

I walked away from reading this book with my imagination completely on fire. I can promise you’ll never look at wax quite the same after reading this book. It takes the pollution of a post-industrial world but filters the premise through magic and god wars. The politics are juicy and the characters come from all walks of life.

In a rather terrifying world of sentient gods, Carillon is an impulsive and short-tempered orphaned runaway who finds herself at the center of a magical plot that involves the thieves' guild, the alchemists' guild, her family, and a terrifying pantheon of gods.

Though a skilled thief, Cari rarely thinks things through and, more often than not, finds herself in trouble as a direct result of her actions. She's also one of those characters whose past comes back to haunt her precisely because she hasn’t properly confronted it. 

Epic fantasy was all I read when I was younger, but these days it takes a particularly gripping book to engage me. There’s too much awesomeness in this book to adequately describe, from the vividness of Guerdon as a metaphorical island in a sea of godly destruction, to the factors pulling motley thieves Carillon, Spar, and Rat apart, to the way Hanrahan reinvents fantasy tropes like goblins and mages. I absolutely tore through this tome, and honestly haven’t found an epic fantasy since that’s anywhere as engaging (other than the sequels).