Gail Carson Levine is the author of the Newbery Honor Book Ella Enchanted; a companion book to that was Fairest, which I reviewed a few months ago. The majority of her books have fairy tales at the base, and a good deal of them are set in pseudo-Western lands. She even wrote an illustrated book for younger readers for the Disney Faeries line. It’s on my TBR pile, I have to admit. This one, her newest, was released a little over a month ago.

Olus is the god of winds in a surprisingly human pantheon; he’s the youngest god by about four hundred years. Of course he’s lonely, so after he turns seventeen, he goes to live in the human world. There, he rents land from a human man who has a very attractive sixteen-year-old daughter named Kezi; Kezi is a rug-maker who loves to dance. In Kezi and her family’s world, they worship a god named Admat. Olus has never heard of Admat, but he falls in love with Kezi. Before they meet formally, though, Kezi has inadvertantly taken a curse upon herself; she is set to die in the temple of Admat very shortly. However, there may be a way to get around that . . .

Despite the cover that is incredibly similar to several of her previous fairy-tale-like volumes, this novel is unrelated to anything else I’ve read by her. Kezi and Olus’s world is a pre-industrial Middle Eastern or eastern Asian sort of world. There are no princesses in this volume, and all the magic is the magic of the gods. While Kezi’s family is wealthy by the standards of the book, they still don’t wear sumptuous robes and cover everything with gold. It’s a very different world from that of Ella and Aza, although none less rich. Kezi is a bright character, and a lovely narrator (she and Olus alternate chapters). She is innovative and loyal, and her belief in Admat is also a deep loyalty in her life. She searches for proof that he exists, despite evidence to the contrary.

Olus’s pantheon contains forty-eight gods, and is rather like the Greek pantheon (but with a little less interpersonal strife). I enjoyed his interactions with his parents; his mother throws her pottery around when she’s displeased with it, and Olus takes this in stride. His interactions with humanity, including a boy he wishes to make his friend, are also amusing. They do serve to highlight his loneliness, though: the boy thinks that Olus’s visit to him is a vision, and insists that he will need to ask a priest what the vision means. After that, Olus has to leave the land where people worship him in order to find people who don’t recognize him. Those people are willing to interact with him normally, provided that he doesn’t act too magical or godlike.

While a lot of this book deals with philosophy (what if your god doesn’t actually exist, and you find out?), there is also a love story, and a heroic quest. It’s difficult to find novels that manage to balance all three ideas, and this book does remarkably well. My only regrets about the book is that it was too short, and there isn’t a sequel planned yet.I’d love to read more set in this world. 4.5/5 stars.