ita, it's been a while since I read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms but I had the impression that it wasn't so much that she had been a god all along but more that when she ascended it made her have been a god retroactively. But I'm not sure know why I thought that. I guess I did find that a little hinky but I could roll with it.

I haven't read the sequels, yet.

Mark Reads is just about to get to Bree in LotR and is seriously creeped out by the barrow wights. And he's got the Ring Wraiths yet to meet. And Aragorn lurking in the shadows.

How delightful.

ita !, I haven't read the third one yet, but my impression was that the goddess (I'm memfaulting on names and have a cat in my lap, so I'm too lasy to go hunt up the damned book) and the heroine were independent of each other -- the goddess' soul-spark, for lack of a better term, had been invested into the heroine, and when she died and was reborn, the goddess didn't come back as the goddess-self, and the heroine kind of took on the goddesses role in the trinity, kept the goddess powers and a splinter of her knowledge/past/personality, but in essence, become a new goddess with the heroine's personality AND took the role of the old godddess in the trinity all at once.

That said, I think that you should definitely continue with the second book. Once the kidlet is gone, I've got #3 on the TBR pile.

She had been a goddess the whole time in that she had the soul in there with her affecting things like how she looked and how she reacted. Which I thought I could handle, but then it all resulted in her ascension, and just fuckit. I grew to hate it in Dean has really been Michael this whole time but didn't know it stories in SPN, and it just...I end up feeling like I've lost a significant part of my investment in the character, and then when it all climaxes for the end, I end up even further away.

I can see that. However, if you liked the writing and the worldbuilding, I do think you'll like #2. There's no pussyfooting around of that nature.

I may grab the sample off B&N.

Not only did that trope remind me of a hated SPN fic one, but her Trickster was very much like Gabriel to me. More than any other trickster I can recall reading/seeing recently. Which worked both for and against the book.

I am finally reading Cold Kiss, and I cannot get The Hush Sound song with that lyric out of my head!

And, I finished reading Cold Kiss. It was so good! I want to know more about the family now. (very late) Yay Amy!

Aw, yay, Sophia! And you will, in the next book!

Isn't that lyric perfect, though? First time I heard it, I thought, "Ooh, that's it, that's the song."

I've been re-reading The Pliocene Exile Saga by Julian May, and I really love it. I am a huge fan of her Galactic Milieu Trilogy (well, really Pentology), which is set in the same universe, as well. I think that a lot of you might enjoy the books - they are epic science fiction, with the central SF concept concerned with what the book calls meta-functions; telepathy, telekinesis, etc. I think she writes great characters (most of whom are decidedly NOT in the normal range of human psychology), and her stories are really quite grand in scope. The science isn't based on anything remotely realistic, as far as I know, but it still feels like hard SF, in that everything is internally consistent and logically thought out; this isn't The Force.