Book Review: Set Fire to the Gods by Sara Raasch and Kristen Simmons

This book! I was so excited to read this book! And when I won it in a giveaway from Harper 360 over the YALC Online weekend I was so hyped. Like, I hadn’t preordered this book but had planned on picking it up as soon as I could.

And now I’ve been able to read it!

This book follows Ash, a girl with fire magic and Madoc, a boy who pretends to had earth magic as they become gladiators and have to fight for their gods. Ash wants to bring her god down and Madoc might wind up being the key to doing that.

I’ve read and enjoyed books by both authors of this before so I knew that I’d love this book. They both picked a character to write and the chapters fit together so seamlessly, the styles seem so similar that you can’t even tell this was written by two different people. It makes me want to write a book with someone else but I know it won’t be as simple for it to work so well.

I loved the world in this book. It was richly populated with different cultures for each of the books. Though you only see two of the countries I want to read more of this world and to discover more about the gods. I want to see how the other gods have let their cities grow, especially the water goddess’s islands.

The characters were really good. There was very little blood family and yet everyone had their own wonderful little units. Unfortunately, there was a lot of death too but…it just made the books more emotional.

As well as some wonderful familial and platonic relationships the romance was pretty fun too. There was a dance scene I really enjoyed and some of the teasing and stuff was cute and fun. I will say that the back did say this was an enemies to lovers relationship which it isn’t really. Not even rivals to lovers. Ash and Madoc are on separate sides but when they first actually meet after their fight, they begin to like eachother pretty quickly. So it wasn’t what I expected, but I still enjoyed it.

This was a really fun read and I would definitely recommend it for anyone looking for a new fantasy series based on a competition.

5/5 stars