I picked this book up on a total whim. I was looking to get out of my comfort zone and just pick a book at random that has a neat cover rather than painstakingly reading reviews and looking who wrote them and what they tend to like and does that match my taste? Nope, just picked this one up and said, let’s go!
It wasn’t for me.
That’s okay. It could be for you, so keep reading!
This book opens with “Fuck the Gods.” That’s honestly fairly catchy and I was into this at first. The gods are real in this book, and it’s the Greek Gods, Zeus, Hades, Hermes, Athena etc. However, this is set in an alternate earth in the modern era.
This is very odd timing as I just started watching Kaos, a show about the Greek gods where Jeff Goldblum plays Zeus which also uses a modern setting.
Lyra doesn’t have any family because her mother gave birth Zeus’s temple and He Took That Personally. Zeus cursed her as a baby that she will live her life without ever being loved. She believes fully that no one could ever love her, and so did her parents as they abandoned her at the age of three to a thieves’ guild. Ever since then she’s been living a life on the streets stealing from others to keep herself and her other thieves afloat. She’s portrayed as a loveable thief since she tries not to steal from people who appear to be decent people, or unable to take the financial hit. She has been known to call off a scam if she starts to feel guilty about it.
As far as the gods are concerned, long ago there was a pact made following a war between the gods that was particularly catastrophic. To avoid ever doing that again, now the gods just recruit humans to fight on their behalf. Every 100 years each god chooses one person to represent them in a contest known as The Crucible. It’s some kind of championship that not everyone returns from, and past champions either can’t or won’t talk about what happens when they come back. So far, Hades had never taken part of the Crucible because it’s determining who rules the Gods, and Hades already rules the underworld, it’s been thought to give him reign over both worlds seemed to be too much to power to put into one god’s hands. Thankfully, up until now, he’s had no interest in it, or so people thought. Naturally, when Hades pops up for the first time to pick a champion, he picks our MC.
There are a bunch of different challenges set forth by each god during The Crucible, and whoever gets the most points by the end wins, and the winner’s god gets to rule for the next 100 years.
These gods are petty and feel very human. Sometimes Gods are written to be inhuman and other worldly, sometimes they’re barely there and just background characters, but these gods felt like just some other human characters with bonus abilities. They bicker with each other and are concerned with small things you’d think beings that live for eternities wouldn’t notice.
Everything was going fine until a romance bloomed between the MC and the God of Death, Hades. It just got to squishy and purple for me. He constantly calls her “his star” and lots of over the top pet names and phrases said to each other. I’m just really not a super romantic person and if anyone would do this kind of stuff to me, call me their star, I’d probably just laugh and ask where the rest of the shrooms are, I’d like to go on an adventure, too! It’s just a little too much for me to listen to an MC swoon because “it turns out the god of death has dimples!”
The best part of this book was definitely Cerberus. Each head had its own personality and Sir was my favorite. Honestly my favorite portrayal of that god-dog ever.
This had a very odd tone that I couldn’t quite place. It was like a PG or PG 13 movie would sometimes break out the R-rated words and scenes — it’s really hard to describe. The MC was so naïve and bubbly, in a lot of ways very inexperienced and sheltered for someone who grew up the way she did. She felt very much so like a teenager, although I can’t recall her exact age. The tone followed pretty closely to the feeling l got reading a Hunger Games book, except there was cursing and occasional sex towards the end. I guess you could argue this is what life is like as you age out of being a child around 17-20 depending on your maturity level.
The audiobook was well-performed and I’d recommend this to anyone who thinks this review sounds good! Take my romance comments with a grain of salt because I’m grumpy and old and prefer my romances that way, too!