The Fallen Faithful by R.A. Sandpiper * * * * *
I really loved this book, although that probably will not come as a huge surprise because I have read everything R.A. Sandpiper has published. She is actually one of my favourite authors, and rather wonderfully, I originally discovered her through TikTok. One of the things I have consistently loved about her books is her world building. She has an incredible imagination for creating worlds that feel distinctive and complex, and The Fallen Faithful absolutely did not disappoint.
This time, we are in an Ancient Greek inspired world built around a pantheon of very real gods. I particularly loved the religion because the gods themselves are based around fairly familiar concepts. There are gods associated with things like love, death and pain, rather than every god having an incredibly elaborate and unusual domain. That actually made the pantheon feel more believable to me. Historically, polytheistic religions often had deities connected to the same fundamental parts of human existence, such as the sun, the moon, war, love and death. What makes Sandpiper's pantheon so interesting is not necessarily what the gods represent, but how religion actually functions around them.
Each god has their own House in the capital, where their devotees live and worship. Becoming a devotee is not simply a matter of deciding which god you like best. There are requirements, and ultimately the god has to choose you in return. Those who are chosen are marked with distinctive golden patterns somewhere on their bodies, with different gods marking their followers differently. Most importantly, these gods are demonstrably real. They speak directly to their devotees. There is no question of whether somebody is praying to an empty room and interpreting silence as divine will. The gods answer.
That made the entire religious structure fascinating to me because faith works very differently in a world where the existence of the gods is not a matter of faith at all. The question is what those gods want from people, what their devotees are prepared to give them, and what happens when someone begins questioning the system in which they have spent their entire life.
Our main character, Annie, has been raised as a devotee of Ekris, the god of love, in the House of Love. She has lived an extremely sheltered life within that system, but at the beginning of the novel she leaves the only world she has ever really known for a mortal man she believes she is going to marry. It goes spectacularly badly. She finds herself outside her House, cut off from the future she thought was guaranteed to her, and having to work out how to exist in a world she has never really been prepared to navigate.
Then she meets Davian, a masked devotee from the infamous House of Pain, and becomes caught up in the investigation of a murder. What begins as one mystery gradually becomes something much larger, and I really enjoyed the way the murder investigation gave the book a structure through which we could explore the world. We are discovering more about the Houses, the gods and the society at the same time that Annie is discovering that much of what she has always believed may not be quite as simple as she thought.
The mystery itself worked for me too. There are genuine clues along the way, and if you are paying attention, you have a chance of putting things together. I always appreciate mysteries that actually allow the reader to participate rather than producing a solution based on information that was deliberately kept from us. I had things to notice, possibilities to consider and reasons to keep turning the pages.
I also really liked Annie. She begins the story quite naive, which makes complete sense considering how sheltered her life has been. What mattered to me was that she was willing to explore. When she encounters things that challenge what she has been taught, she does not simply refuse to engage with them. She thinks, questions and gradually opens her mind. Her development therefore feels like an actual process rather than the story suddenly replacing one version of Annie with another.
And yes, I liked Davian too. He is one of those brooding, quiet, black clad men that fantasy romance apparently intends to keep producing until the end of time. Sandpiper has written a somewhat similar type of male character before, particularly in her first trilogy, but I liked him there too, so I am certainly not going to complain about getting another one. The dynamic between Annie and Davian worked for me, and even though I am not a huge romance reader, I enjoyed watching their relationship develop.
There are spicy scenes, although I mostly skipped them because I am simply not particularly interested in reading those at this point in my life. I did read enough to get an impression of them, and they seemed well written. More importantly for me, the romance itself worked outside those scenes. I need to care about the relationship rather than just the physical attraction, and I did here.
The side characters were another strength. They felt distinct enough that I could keep track of everyone, and they helped make the world feel inhabited rather than existing purely to move Annie and Davian from one plot point to another. That is particularly important in fantasy because even the most imaginative setting can feel strangely empty if everyone except the protagonists seems to exist only when the plot needs them.
Sandpiper's writing style is also very much to my taste. I would describe it as clean rather than flowery. The prose is not constantly drawing attention to itself or trying to produce a beautiful sentence for the sake of producing a beautiful sentence. Instead, it serves the characters, the story and the world.
Personally, that is exactly what I want. I recently read a book with absolutely gorgeous prose, but underneath that beautiful writing was a story that felt incredibly familiar. There was almost nothing in it that I had not encountered before. I ended up giving it three stars because the writing was lovely and the book was not bad, but beautiful sentences could not make the actual story more interesting to me.
Given the choice, I would much rather read something like The Fallen Faithful. Give me an imaginative world I want to explore. Give me characters I care about, a mystery I want to solve and an adventure that keeps me turning the pages. The prose does not need to stand in front of all of that waving its arms and demanding that I admire it.
The Fallen Faithful gave me exactly the things I already love about R.A. Sandpiper's books while introducing a completely new world that I became fascinated by. The combination of the murder mystery, the romance and especially the religious world building made this a very easy book for me to recommend.
Thank you so much to R.A. Sandpiper for giving me the opportunity to read an ARC again. I went into The Fallen Faithful already knowing how much I love her writing, and I came out of it with another Sandpiper world I did not want to leave.
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