This was such a hyped booked in part of the plot and also because it’s a new release of a well loved romance author, Katee Stewart. I’ve never read a Katee Stewart book and so I was planning to pick up one soon and it just happened that her newest release was a Persophene and Hades story and I LOVE Persophene and Hades. Lore Olympus is one of the few things I look forward to every week and the true story of Persophene and Hades’ relationship is just so capturing, I can’t get enough of it.
All that said, I went in with high hopes for this book and was… surprised.
This book was heavy on the romance and as someone who hasn’t read Katee Stewart, I now realize that this is the norm for her books lol. Which is fine but I felt like something was missing from this book. It felt like I got only steam and not enough plot. I think I was expecting a lot more of the Greek mythology aspect of the plot to play a bigger role in this book but it didn’t.
Hades was made out to be this big, ominous guy who’s so confident in confronting Zeus but when that moment actually happened, it was so incredibly anticlimactic and when a certain thing happened, I was like I’m sorry did that REALLY just happen, is that how we’re doing things here? This is me being as vague as I can lol without blurting out any spoilers. While there was a nice distinction between the tough, scary, Hades and the softer, more compassionate, Hades who deals with Persophene, the scary was never truly scary.
Personally, I think that this book could have taken more advantage of the mythological side of the plot and added a ton more tension to this book and made it a bit more gripping. The one plot point that I think was meant to add the majority of tension in the plot panned out pretty anticlimactic to me. I just wanted a bit more.
Once again, these are just my opinions as someone who loves a bit more of a tension filled plot with my romances rather than just continuous romance.
I was ironically writing the review for the first book in this series while reading this book and going on about how much I loved how NAME didn’t fall into the unfortunate rank of other romance books that while entertaining, fall a bit flat because their plot feels stagnant in the sense that there’s nothing in the plot that screams that it’s new or invigorating. I don’t mean this in a mean way because no story is ever truly original or authentic or new because everything’s been done before. I personally believe that a romance book that sticks out amongst others, especially a romance in a genre that pumps out books in such high volumes such as historical romances, there are certain elements that can make or break. story and make it feel new and fresh enough. For example, it can take a trope we’ve all heard and spin it around or explore characters and themes that are underrepresented or even just have a character who’s so hard to not root for or hate. And sometimes, it’s just about the timing. I truly do believe that sometimes, the real reason why you mesh with a book or not is because of the time you read it. Were you stressed during that time? Were you feeling the genre or the writing style?
The first book stuck out and became one of my favorites because it followed a hard of hearing female character who’s so strong and is willing to fight for what she wants and the representation felt so real and natural as the author’s based the character off her husband. The romance between the two characters was something new for me as well because while the two mc’s were from dueling clans, the male mc was so respectful and protective of his wife and it was just so endearing. And of course, this was my first highlander book and so it was extra special to me for that reason.
The second book though, felt recycled and I think the similarities in the plot between the first and second book felt so much more apparent to me because I read them back to back and they chronologically followed each other in a series. The female mc in the second book faced the same aggressive behavior from the clan she was staying with as the female mc in the first book from the clan she married into. It got pretty tiring to read about the women in these clans throwing rocks at these female mc’s or tricking them into doing all these house chores because their husbands/ significant other’s would like it. While the treatment was different, the intent and general aggression from the host clan’s felt way too repetitive and had too many similarities.
I also just didn’t care for the romance in this book. I couldn’t feel the tension and while the male mc was protective of the female mc, it didn’t carry the weight the first book’s relationship did.
Not really liking the romance and certain elements of the plot didn’t really help with my overall experience with this book lol.
What are the last two average romance books that you’ve read or books that have disappointed you a bit?
[…] Mini-Reviews: Two Average Romance Reads […]