The Wicked + The Divine Volumes 7 & 8

I decided to combine these next two into one review since I've been reading them so fast. Volume 7: Mothering Invention, is building towards the climax of the story. It's also explaining a lot of Ananke's past. Mothering Invention showed how this whole game started, and how it has played out through the millennia. 

But then Volume 8: Old is the New New, was completely different. I was excited for more of the story, and totally unprepared for this interlude: Old is the New New collects some short pieces that tell stories of other pantheons, and so isn't part of the main story. It was interesting to see different incarnations of gods like Lucifer (though I was really uncomfortable with how graphically gruesome the Roman story was). There was also a combination prose/comic story of the 1923 Pantheon created like an Agatha Christie mystery (specifically And Then There Were None) which was interesting but at times a bit hard to follow due to the way it was written (and the way the Morrigan spoke). The volume then ends with a collection of Funnies written in the world, which were amusing. 

I do wish I had realized what Volume 8 was sooner: Gillen suggests the reading order for these stories, and they may have been more effective if read where they were intended, rather than as a whole chunk near the end of the story. They may also have been better to read after the conclusion in Volume 9 (though we'll see - I haven't read 9 yet, so I can't say for sure).