River of Gods

Took me two weeks to get through this, which for a book I ended up rating this high is unusual for me, and I want to be honest about that up front. River of Gods is dense, nine point of view characters, a country choked with a billion and a half people and twelve semi-independent nations, and McDonald doesn’t slow down to orient you. I was looking up terms more than once in the first hundred pages, slang and tech and cultural references I didn’t have, and I nearly put it down.

What kept me going was how deliberate every detour felt once I trusted it. Nothing here reads like padding, even the back-alley scenes that seem like texture turn out to matter later. The AI thread, an intelligence approaching something like personhood while a Ministry hunts down anything that crosses a legal threshold of self-awareness, is the strongest idea in the book, and the sealed-coin tension of not knowing which side of that line a character sits on carries more weight than most of the human plots around it.

Where I hedge is the female characters, and I noticed it enough while reading that it stuck with me after. Tal in particular reads like an author writing what he imagines vulnerability looks like rather than a person, all emotion, none of the harder edges given more freely to the male leads. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s the kind of thing that keeps this from being a five for me even with everything else McDonald gets right.

An Irish writer going this deep into Indian setting and slang is a real swing, and I can’t personally verify how it lands for a reader who actually knows that world the way I know a euro board game’s rulebook. What I can say is it never once felt like research for its own sake. It felt like a country, overwhelming on purpose, and I was glad to have visited even when I wanted out by the middle.