That book had received great reviews so I expected kind of a lot from it but I was disappointed ; I wanted to like this book.
The story is about Kate Winters, casual girl whose mom is on the verge of dying and asks her daughter to come back to her hometown, Eden - cliché boring small town. There she meets Henry, aka Hades, devastatingly handsome but dark who proposes to her to save her mom for a little while and in exchange, she has to live with him 6 months of the year and pass 7 tests to prove she’s worthy of being a Goddess.
The story managed to interest me as a fan of Greek Mythology, but I was really annoyed by the fact that Aimée Carter actually rewrote a portion of the myth ; Hades didn’t actually kidnap Persephone, it was an arranged marriage. Hades & Persephone’s myth happens to be one of my favorites, and I don’t really appreciate it being altered for the sake of making Henry look like a victim and the nice guy - she made him like Edward Cullen, for heaven's sake. I liked Hades as he was, thank you very much.
Which leads us to my second point : the characters are all a bit bland, especially the main character Kate who’s a real Mary-Sue. When she arrived to the small town, she really annoyed me being all Daria and haughty with her snotty inner comments… Reminded me in a bad way of Bella from Twilight. Ew.
The author also doesn’t really develop the friendships : she says that X and Y are friends but doesn’t show it in any way (and I think writing should be all about suggesting stuff so that the reader concludes it) and it just feels all very superficial and unexplained. The characters have really little depth and I actually don’t like Henry that much.
It was a very predictable story - I’m not saying I knew exactly how it would end but most of it was just painfully obvious and the plot outside the test is just your stereotypical girl hates boy, learns to know him and falls madly in love with him and boy, even if he looks all cold and aloof, actually loves her as well. And I have by the way no idea why Henry has any interest in the main character because I still have no idea what her personality’s like.
Another bit that made me furious : what's up with YA-writers that make their heroins have sex unwillingly? Because they were forced, because they were under some kind of spell or whatever. Like girls aren't supposed to initiate sex or desire sex, they can only have sex if they're old enough not to shock people and if they don't do it on purpose so they can stay all nice and innocent. Can you be more misogynistic?
I’m a bit harsh there, I did read the story quite fast and enjoy it and I think it’s the author’s first book so.. I wouldn’t recommend it to a mythology afficionado since most of it is altered to match the author’s wishes and it doesn’t have that much presence in the book, but it’s still a rather nice and fluent reading. I had good hope that the author would get better for the second book, however it somehow managed to be even worse. See my review for the second installment in the series. I do not recommend this at all.
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