TITLE: Darkness Becomes Her
Gods and Monsters series Book 1
AUTHOR: Kelly Keaton
PUBLISHED: 2011
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Urban fantasy, southern, romance, mythology
PREMISE: A girl finds out she is cursed and goes to New Orleans to undo the curse.
MY REVIEW: Okay...I'm a little split on this book. There things I absolutely loved and then there was much of it where I was going "um, what?". I mean I did love what the author did with the setting, how she took a major event like Katrina and spun it into a alternate history but then she started to lose me after suddenly oh hey look Athena is here! I also feel the characterization of Athena is really off. I feel this goddess is more Hera then Athena. Hera was the one who cared about people surpassing her beauty, not Athena. Before anyone mentions Arachne, she did that because Arachne boasted that she was better at things then Athena herself. Her wrath was to teach her not to boast. It had very little to do with vanity, though some of that was in there too. So personally I think it would have made more sense for the evil goddess to be Hera.
And that is my ultimate issue with this book, despite liking quite a bit of it. I loved the creativity, but some of the creativity made no sense. I loved some of the humor to it, but equally some of the lines were very cheesy and contrived. I enjoyed some of the characters (particularly the kids) but I feel the relationships were poorly developed especially the romance which kind of came out of nowhere. It was like for everything I enjoyed, there was something else that would bug me.
So as a whole...I say this is a decent enough start to a series I just think there could be lots of room for improvement. I will be checking out the sequel though because while things did bother me, I did enjoy a lot of it. I say check it out from the library to see if it's for you.
WHO SHOULD READ: UF fans, mythology fans, you don't mind wackyness or darkness
MY RATING: Three and a half out of Five snakes
Hmmmm...it sounds like this book is a little all over the place, but I always try to give first books the benefit of the doubt, so I might give this one a try.
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Hmm, this book is on my list and I still want to give it a try (I love mythology) but it's now a couple of books lower on the list :) Thanks for the review!
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