Goddess Interrupted by Aimee Carter

Goddess Interrupted (Goddess Test #2) : 1/5 stars

This book was so unbelievably bad I don't understand how it got published.
Now that Kate's accepted her role as the Queen of the Underworld and her mutual love for Henry, she cannot wait to go back to his waiting arms in Hell. However, the welcome is not quite the one she expected, as Kronos, the evil Titan, prepares his vengeance against the Gods with the help of Calliope.
Kate is a whiny judgmental attention whore with whom everyone falls in love in this book (god knows why) and I couldn't stand her. This is especially bad since this is a first person narrative and we had no other choice but to bear with her warped sense of things and her incessant comments about how Ava and Persephone are sluts.
The story? Well, there isn't one. This should have taken one third of a book, however it just stretched and stretched and stretched and it was all unnecessary. Nothing happens. Kate goes to the Underworld, have 5 pages long emotional debates, shit happens, she has emotional turmoils and fights with Henry. That's it, folks. You don't have to read it anymore.
The "romantic relationship" between her and Henry is the most frustrating crap. Henry has turned into an utter jerk duing those 6 months of summer - wait, no, not in a jerk. In a stone. He's basically a wall and Kate turns into a spoiled attention whore. Do you know any tenenovelas or Korean dramas? Do you see how the two main characters are in love at first, but don't dare to say it because of crappy misunderstandings like one of them thinks the girl is actually a man and don't want to be gay, or one of them catches the other with a girl but it's actually his sister and it lasts really long until finally one of them decides to kiss the other. This is this book. Crappy telenovela-worthy misunderstandings that keep Kate and Henry away and it's just annoying and you want to both slap both of them but mostly Kate.
Plus, the author continues to completely butcher the mythology. Henry is still depicted as a poor victim, Persephone as a slut and Kate still allows herself to judge her. What does she know about marriage, tell me, with her 18 years of life and no previous boyfriend experience? Yet she goes "I'm holier-than-thou" on everyone. And what was up with Dylan refusing to participate in the battle? At first I didn't care and in the ending, the real name of the Gods are reminded and I see "Dylan -> Ares". How does that make sense, Ares backing out on a battle but Aphrodite volunteering? This was horrible.
I do not recommend this book at all and won't purchase the third book.

The Goddess Test by Aimee Carter

 The Goddess Test #1 : 2/5 stars

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.