Kissed by the Gods by Caty Rogan

 Kissed by the Gods

by Caty Rogan

My Rating: 🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊

Spice Rating: 🌶🌶

Blurb:

Leina has spent a lifetime submitting. Kneeling. Enduring.

Then soldiers come for her brother, and divine fury surges through her veins. She expects execution for the bodies she left in her wake. Her people have met bloody ends for far, far less.

Instead, Ryot, a godsworn warrior born to privilege and raised in order, drags her into a world that was never meant for her. One of divine armies and death demons, winged war horses and monsters, sacred power and royal secrets.

A kiss from a goddess changes everything.

No longer a criminal, Leina is a prize. The kingdom’s most powerful men want what the goddess touched. Leina wants only one thing, though: freedom for her people. And she’ll trade herself for the strength to destroy the kingdom that broke them.

Conscripted into a war she never asked for, fighting for gods she doesn’t believe in, Leina must decide how far she’s willing to go and what she’s willing to lose. Because her power is more than a threat to the kingdom’s buried secrets.

It’s a death sentence.

My Review: 

There are books you read once and enjoy. And then there are books you come back to, intentionally, hungrily, because the first time was simply not enough. Kissed by the Gods falls firmly and without question into that second category for me. This was my second time reading this story, and I paired it with the audiobook this time around, and I have to tell you, experiencing it that way elevated the entire thing to a completely new level.

Let me talk about that audiobook for a moment because it deserves its own spotlight. The narrator is exceptional. There is a certain kind of magic that happens when the right voice meets the right story, and that is exactly what this is. Every character felt alive, every scene felt vivid, and the world that Caty Rogan built on the page came breathing and roaring to life through the audio in a way that genuinely gave me chills. If you have been on the fence about trying the audiobook version, let me be the one to push you right off that fence. Do it. You will not be sorry.

Now let us talk about the story itself because it is something special. The war college setting is an absolute dream and I am completely and unashamedly here for it. There is something about that kind of structure, that rigid, high stakes, brutal training ground environment, that makes every moment of rebellion and triumph feel ten times more satisfying. Add in Pegasus, add in magic, add in the concept of slipping into liminal spaces that exist between worlds, and you have a story that fires on every single cylinder of my imagination.

I know what some people might say. They might say this feels familiar, that elements of this story echo things we have read before in the fantasy and romantasy space. And yes, there are recognizable threads woven through it. But here is what I believe with my whole heart. A story does not have to be entirely without precedent to be extraordinary. Kissed by the Gods took every familiar ingredient and turned it into something that felt electric and alive and completely worth every single one of its five stars. Because that is exactly what it earned from me. Five stars, no hesitation, no asterisks.

A huge part of why this book hits so hard is our female main character. She is not weak. She is not waiting to be saved. She is not standing quietly on the sidelines hoping someone else will fix things. She fights. She pushes. She scrapes and claws and refuses to give up on finding and protecting her people, which is honestly all any of us would want to do if we found ourselves dropped into a world as harsh and unforgiving as this one.

But what gets me even more than her strength is where she started. Because she was told to be quiet. She was told to be small. She was surrounded by people and circumstances that expected her to shrink and depend and stay in her lane. And every single time she was handed that expectation, she chose violence instead. She chose to stand up. She chose to fight back. She planted her feet and refused to move.

I will never get tired of that. Ever. There is something so deeply empowering about a woman who has been underestimated, talked over, pushed down, and told she is not enough, standing ten toes down anyway and proving every single one of those voices wrong. It gets me every time without fail, and this book delivered that feeling in spades.

if war college settings make your heart race, if you believe as fiercely as I do that women fighting for what they love will never get old, then Kissed by the Gods needs to be on your list immediately. And for the love of everything, get the audiobook.