The Godungava by Joel Puga

The Godungava 
by Joel Puga

3 Stars

Pages: 175

Genre: Fantasy

Published: 10 February 2018

Publisher's Blurb

During the day, Seidus is just a simple blacksmith. At night, nevertheless, he becomes the hero of a world that exists only inside his head. However, few ideas come to the isolated village where he lives and, over the years, his inner world has become repetitive and boring. Accompanied by Iriáris, a childhood friend, he leaves in search of new ideas, but they quickly become involved in a dangerous quest for an ancestral artifact that can save their nation from the invasion of a powerful enemy: the Godungava.

As they follow the clues leading to the artifact, Seidus, Iriáris and their new companions are forced to visit the most dangerous places in the Theocracy of Charglassume and encounter kappas, veloryans, hydras, the undead, and even dragons, while attempting to prevent their rivals from reaching their goal before them.

Filled with adventure, fantastic locations and creatures, magic and battles, this is an ideal book for any lover of epic fantasy and sword and sorcery.

Review

The Godungava is a fantasy novella heavily influenced by the world of Dungeons & Dragons. 

The storyline is fairly well-paced but tends to get bogged down during the fight sequences which I feel are a little heavy on the description of the individual blows struck by the characters. 

The author has  clearly spent time developing the background for his universe and I can see potential for future titles to further develop some of the elements that are only touched on here. 

I would like to see a bit more character development for the main antagonists which would allow readers to invest more care in their eventual outcome but as this is just a relatively short story it would slow down the narrative and either cause the book to be over long or to remove some of the storyline.

The names of some of the characters can be difficult to pronounce which causes momentary instances where you are jerked out of the story in order to re-read them in order to pronounce them correctly. Some of the names are also too similar which can create a tiny amount of confusion but this would be easy to solve if the book was to be published on a large scale in the future.

Despite what appears above to be a quite negative review, I actually enjoyed the story and with a simple bit of tidying up on the names and combat details this would be a good book for fantasy and D&D enthusiasts. 

All in all this was an interesting read which would be popular among its target audience.

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The Author

Joel Puga was born in the Portuguese city of Viana do Castelo in 1983. Since an early age, he has been in contact with fantasy and science fiction, mainly thanks to dubbed films and TV shows transmitted by Spanish channels. As soon as he learned how to read, he got into genre literature; starting his adventure with Julio Verne's books. It was during this time that he produced his first stories, generally using other author's universes as a backdrop, the reading of which was reserved to family and friends.

In 2001, he moved to Braga to follow his studies, a time in which he decided his writings should be more than a private hobby. This granted him several publications in Portuguese anthologies and fanzines of various sub-genres of speculative fiction.

Today, he lives in Braga, where he divides his time between his job as a computer engineer, as well as writing and reading.

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