Tagged: persephone
Persephone by Kaitlin Bevis
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
One day Persephone is an ordinary high school senior working at her mom’s flower shop in Athens, Georgia. The next she’s fighting off Boreas, the brutal god of Winter, and learning that she’s a bonafide goddess—a rare daughter of the now-dead Zeus. Her goddess mom whisks her off to the Underworld to hide until Spring.
There she finds herself under the protection of handsome Hades, the god of the dead, and she’s automatically married to him. It’s the only way he can keep her safe. Older, wiser, and far more powerful than she, Hades isn’t interested in becoming her lover, at least not anytime soon. But every time he rescues her from another of Zeus’s schemes, they fall in love a little more. Will Hades ever admit his feelings for her?
Can she escape the grasp of her powerful dad’s minions? The Underworld is a very cool place, but is it worth giving up her life in the realm of the living? Her goddess powers are developing some serious, kick-butt potential. She’s going to fight back.
[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
I’ve always been fascinated with the Persephone myth but never really found a great interpretation of it in YA. Usually it’s a case of Stockholm Syndrome disguised as a romance. But that’s definitely not the case with Kaitlin Bevis’ version.
Zeus is dead and all of the other gods are jockeying for his position. Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter and as such is a great target for Boreas, the god of winter when he decides he wants to seize power. The only way to do that it so eliminate any potential rivals, mainly Zeus’ children. One of the things that I really liked about the whole story was the intrigue between the gods and the clear respect Kaitlin Bevis has for the original myths. Sure, she changes some things around like Hades’ personality but she really does try to portray most of them as their ‘original’ selves, not sanitized for modern sensibilities. The gods in Greek myths are total jerks. Most gods and goddesses in Kaitlin Bevis’ work are also jerks; that just makes sense. And as a relatively new goddess Persephone has a lot to catch up to in the intrigue department as everyone else has had thousands of years experience in fighting and back-stabbing.
Persephone herself really is a great character. She is understandably shocked when she learns that she and her mother are real life goddesses and she’s really, really shocked when she gets attacked by Boreas and saved by Hades. Hades, to his credit saved her without any real expectations of gratitude seeing as by saving Persephone and bringing her to the Underworld, she is technically his wife. He tries to make Persephone’s 6 month stay in the Underworld as pleasant as possible while educating her on her growing powers and the world of intrigue she’s just been awakened to. But as they spend more time together, Persephone and Hades start to tolerate, then like and then clearly love each other. Their relationship is pretty stormy in the beginning because Persephone was not too crazy about the whole “I have to spend how long in the Underworld every year?!” thing. Yet they both decide to act like mature adults and try to make the best of the situation. Hades gets people to teach Persephone about being a goddess and Persephone decides she’s tired of being a damsel in distress and asks to learn some self-defense. When they start to fall in love with each other, it’s really to Bevis’ credit that she doesn’t just skate around the enormous age gap between the two. No, she makes it a major sticking point between them and because of that it’s way less creepy than some Persephone retellings I’ve read.
I know Persephone isn’t a book for everyone because it’s not exactly fast-paced in the beginning. It starts off a little slow with a seemingly typical YA situation before taking some interesting twists and turns in order to subvert the usual school tropes. Things get exciting once Persephone is in the Underworld but then the actual action slows down as Persephone learns how to be a goddess. She goes through a lot of personal growth that’s very interesting and I really enjoyed the interpersonal conflicts between pretty much all of the characters. For me it was exciting and didn’t drag at all as there was always this undercurrent of tension, this sense of unease as spring drew closer and Boreas grew more and more desperate to kill Persephone. Some people will probably complain about the ‘slow’ plot but if you like well-written books with good character development this book is definitely for you.
Persephone ends on quite a cliffhanger and I’m very interested to see where the Daughters of Zeus series goes! The ending was satisfying because it tied up quite a few loose ends but at the same time it leaves you hungry for more. It’s pretty hard not to fall in love with Bevis’ characters and that’s in part what makes the cliffhanger so interesting. If the blurb and/or my review has intrigued you in any way or you just plain love Greek mythology, Persephone is a great book to try out.
I give this book 5/5 stars.
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Underworld by Meg Cabot
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
Escape from the realm of the dead is impossible when someone there wants you back.
Seventeen-year-old Pierce Oliviera isn’t dead.
Not this time.
But she is being held against her will in the dim, twilit world between heaven and hell, where the spirits of the deceased wait before embarking upon their final journey.
Her captor, John Hayden, claims it’s for her own safety. Because not all the departed are dear. Some are so unhappy with where they ended up after leaving the Underworld, they’ve come back as Furies, intent on vengeance…on the one who sent them there and on the one whom he loves.
But while Pierce might be safe from the Furies in the Underworld, far worse dangers could be lurking for her there…and they might have more to do with its ruler than with his enemies.
And unless Pierce is careful, this time there’ll be no escape.
It’s not often that I don’t understand the plot of a book, especially a contemporary Young Adult novel. So I tried to figure things out with my friend and we had a conversation that went like this (SPOILERS!):
Me: So she hates John, then loves him at the end of the first book then goes back to hating him in the second book?
Friend: Yep.
Me: Then in the second book she hates him in the beginning, then loves him again, hates him again and then has sex with him and decides she loves him and wants to spend the rest of her life with him?
Friend: Sounds about right.
Me: Meanwhile, Mr. Smith told Pierce that she and John were meant for each other in the first book then discourages their relationship in the second book? And what was with nobody having a problem with Pierce coming back from being ‘kidnapped’ two days later and showing up at Coffin Fest?
Friend: *facepalm*
Between the two of us we probably read around 300 books per year. And yet no book has stumped us as much as Underworld. What the heck was Meg Cabot thinking? Her Airhead trilogy was amazing and had both strong male and female characters with a plot that took a lot of twists and turns but made sense. Her Abandon Trilogy feels sexist because Pierce can never figure anything out on her own and the characters are so inconsistent that it almost feels like a YA parody.
I hate Pierce. I really, truly loathe this idiotic main character. She’s supposed to be so kind, caring and delicate but she really just comes off as a Mary Sue who can’t do anything for herself. Pierce is so bad that I keep getting this strange feeling Meg Cabot wrote a satire piece without telling anyone. How could such a strongly feminist author create a character like this? Pierce always needs John to rescue her and she always flips between hating him and loving him. Something that always puzzled me was how she fell for John in the first place. He’s your stereotypical tortured bad boy who is supposedly ‘kind’ underneath but is really still a jerk that treats the heroine like garbage. In his case, it meant kidnapping Pierce, mentally abusing her, not telling her anything at all about himself or the Underworld and holding her against her will. Sounds pretty jerk-like to me.
I won’t even touch the fact that these two have all the chemistry and charm of a brick wall. That would provoke a rant all on its own.
I had read Underworld in hope that it would be better than Abandon because all of the backstory was out of the way. But no, it’s actually worse. Not all the backstory is out of the way and we finally learn something about John, after Meg Cabot hinting at it for 200 pages then revealing it to Pierce out of nowhere through luck (read: author intervention). There’s also the issue of all of the minor characters in the story. Their actions are meant to help drive the plot forward, but their actions don’t make any sense. Pierce shows up after being missing for two days and not only is Uncle Chris completely okay with it, everyone who sees her at Coffin Fest is too. Is nobody wondering where a seventeen-year-old girl went to for two days on a tiny island community? I live in a rural community; everyone would be so nosy that she wouldn’t get to breathe, let alone wander around before the cops were called.
Terrible, just terrible. That sums up the entire book. I don’t think I’ll be reading any Meg Cabot books for a long time now. Underworld just completely put me off my appetite for any more of her writing.
I give this book 0.5/5 stars.
Goddess Interrupted by Aimée Carter
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
Becoming immortal wasn’t supposed to be the easy part. Though Kate is about to be crowned Queen of the Underworld, she’s as isolated as ever. And despite her growing love for Henry, ruler of the Underworld, he’s becoming ever more distant and secretive. Then, in the midst of Kate’s coronation, Henry is abducted by the only being powerful enough to kill him: the King of the Titans.
As the other gods prepare for a war that could end them all, it is up to Kate to save Henry from the depths of Tartarus. But in order to navigate the endless caverns of the Underworld, Kate must enlist the help of the one person who is the greatest threat to her future.
Henry’s first wife, Persephone.
As you may or may not remember, I was sort of disappointed in The Goddess Test. It just didn’t live up to its full potential, but I saw that the sequel did have potential, so I went ahead and bought Goddess Interrupted anyway. This time I went into the novel with a completely open mind (with no expectations about how the tests would go) and I think that was what made the difference.
I found Kate a much more sympathetic character in this second book and Henry is actually trying to move on from Persephone. They actually start to *gasp* fall in love for real, not the fake teenage love that happened in the first book. The secondary characters like Ava, Kate’s mother and even Persephone herself get a lot more page time and their backgrounds are fascinating. Persephone is probably my favourite character in the novel, not because she’s especially sympathetic, but because she’s very complex.
The plot, as in the first book, was very good and the cliffhanger Aimée Carter puts at the end of the novel is brilliant. No doubt even fans who have a ‘meh’ attitude toward the book will be anxious for the last book in the trilogy, The Goddess Inheritance. Which, by the way, releases on February 19, 2013 according to Amazon.
I give this book 3.5/5 stars.
The Goddess Test by Aimée Carter
(Cover picture courtesy of Reading Angel.)
It’s always been just Kate and her mom—and her mother is dying. Her last wish? To move back to her childhood home. So Kate’s going to start a new school with no friends, no other family and the fear her mother won’t live past the fall.
Then she meets Henry. Dark. Tortured. And mesmerizing. He claims to be Hades, god of the Underworld—and if she accepts his bargain, he’ll keep her mother alive while Kate tries to pass seven tests.
Kate is sure he’s crazy—until she seems him bring a girl back from the dead. Now saving her mother seems crazily possible. If she succeeds, she’ll become Henry’s future bride, and a goddess.
If she fails…
I love the Greek myths, so I thought I would love The Goddess Test. It had an interesting premise, with the promise of a good light read. But I have to say my overall impression of the book can be summed up in one word: meh.
Kate is an interesting protagonist and a decent enough character, but I had a hard time getting inside her head. Aimée Carter truly needed to add more emotion to her writing to pull off a romance like this one, but she didn’t. The chemistry between Henry and Kate was thoroughly unsatisfying because there was little to none of it. Henry remained too distant and enamored with his lost love, Persephone, and it still seemed like Kate was only there out of a sense of duty, even toward the end when she supposedly ‘loved’ him. For me, the characters and the romance they had just didn’t ring true.
The whole premise of the book had a lot of promise, but it too fell flat. I was expecting actual test, rather than just completely secret ones that weren’t really obvious until the end. This is a spoiler, but Kate actually failed one of the tests, but still got to be a goddess because of a loophole. It is probably my own fault for expecting The Goddess Test to be more like Ever by Gail Carson Levine, but I feel like I was let down when I read this.
If you love fast-paced plots and romance, you will love The Goddess Test as long as you don’t pay much attention to the characters.
I give this book 3/5 stars.