(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.

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