No Gods, No Monsters

A Novel (The Convergence Saga, Book 1)

By: Cadwell Turnbull

Narrated by: Dion Graham

Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's Summary

One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother has been shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it.

As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend’s trail of bread crumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters.

At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark?

The world will soon find out.

©2021 Cadwell Turnbull (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

amazing!

I went into this book honestly not thinking I was going to enjoy it, boy was I wrong. this book is so captivating it just pulls you in there's something refreshing about going into a book knowing what genre is but exploring something totally new and exciting. yes there's multiple stories going on but it all connects and come together so well! and the narrator did such an amazing job! the author and the narrator just got a new fan!

Hummmmmm

Beautifully written, but the story line jumps all over the place. It doesn’t feel completely connected.

A whole less than the sum of its parts

There were a lot of individual images, turns of phrase, and story beats in this I liked, but the novel as a whole is a mess. There’s a ton of characters, plot threads, and concepts that get introduced, but they’re hard to keep track of and don’t come together in a satisfying way. It’s not just that they don’t come together plot wise, which isn’t so bad, it’s that THEMATICALLY they seem to have very little to do with each other.

This felt like a short story collection clumsily masquerading as a novel.

Don’t waste your time.

Disconnected story. Performance flat and somewhat creepy. Also manages to be preachy which detracts from whatever could be entertaining about the work.

A Tale of Too Much & Too Little.

If there was any kind of a plot here it was buried under too many characters who came in & out of the narrative without giving us a clear ID of who they were, what's really at stake in this world or even what kind of "monster" they were suppose to be.
That seriously lost my interest in not knowing who's POV was taking center stage, and the so called monsters that were suppose to be introduced here, never stood out enough to hold my interest.
Just a long struggle from beginning to end.

What a mess!

The narration is wonderful🙂

Sadly, this is a disjointed, jumbled, mess of a story. It has the focus of a story written by a small child. New characters, new locations, new ideas, new timelines, new perspectives and just to make it worse - alternate realities.
It's a story about everything and nothing. It started promising, but soon the author gets lost in his own story in his attempt to be clever. He writes well, I'll give him that, but the story is a trainwreck.

Disappointing

This book jumped around to much. The story is very difficult to follow. I just want to hear a good story, not a lesson.

Incredible

I can't wait for the next book. The characters are so full and vibrant.

Too disjointed

This is a good book that could have been a great book. The story was too sprawling and diffuse across too many characters. Maybe it’s set up for the next book. There’s some good allegory to current events in the story. Overall, it could be much better.

Ramblings

The book didn’t know what it was trying to say. Was it a monster book? It has monsters in it. Was it a commentary on culture clash? There was talk of cultures clashing but not to a point that you cared. Was it a dimension hoping jumble? For about 2 chapters. Was there any resolution? No.

Interesting if occasionally hard to follow start

Overall I enjoyed this book, the setting and themes are familiar but also slightly different(Monsters have been among us for ages then have to reveal themselves).

The main strength of the book is in its characters and reasonably wide selection of different people from different backgrounds all dealing with the mundane and magical in their own ways.

I thought the general themes of identity and civil rights were very well done and fit the narrative very well, certainly not preachy as some have said(I'm not entirely sure including some scenes and themes around race gender etc constitutes being called preachy).

looking forward to seeing where the next book goes.

I'd go with a solid 7/10

Utterly disappointing.

Focus group crafted characters and settings. Awful, draining long sections of utterly mundane monotony interspersed with incoherent episodes of violence and cosmic space opera. Truly terrible waste of time. The reader is lethargic and excruciatingly faltering.