Goddess Interrupted, by Aimee Carter

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Author’s website
Publication date – March 27, 2012

Summary: (Taken from GoodReads) Kate Winters has won immortality. But if she wants a life with Henry in the Underworld, she’ll have to fight for it.

Becoming immortal wasn’t supposed to be the easy part. Though Kate is about to be crowned Queen of the Underworld, she’s as isolated as ever. And despite her growing love for Henry, ruler of the Underworld, he’s becoming ever more distant and secretive. Then, in the midst of Kate’s coronation, Henry is abducted by the only being powerful enough to kill him: the King of the Titans. As the other gods prepare for a war that could end them all, it is up to Kate to save Henry from the depths of Tartarus. But in order to navigate the endless caverns of the Underworld, Kate must enlist the help of the one person whom she would really rather not meet. Henry’s first wife, Persephone.

Thoughts: True to the arrangement she made with Hades/Henry in the first book of the trilogy, Kate has spent her first half-year away from the Underworld, and returns to find out that things aren’t quite as she left them. Henry is distant from her, both emotionally and physically, and Kate begins to wonder if it was really such a good idea to marry him if this is how they’re going to spend eternity together.

Oh yes, and an imprisoned Titan is being released and has a serious grudge to bear against the pantheon.

Though I might have come across there as a little sarcastic in my presentation of the book’s premise, I promise you that the romance is not the driving power behind the plot. It certainly has its place, and it’s very often on Kate’s mind, but I find that rather understandable given her situation. She can’t deny that she is in love with the god of the Underworld, whom she married and consented to rule by for eternity, and he seems to have everything on his mind but her. And that everything includes Persephone, the woman who left him for another man, and whom Henry has admitted to still loving.

It’s not an easy situation for Kate, and I think she can be excused for having her love interest on the brain. And yet, when danger threatens, she goes forward with the intention of not only saving Henry, but all of the deities she has come to know and love. her love interest is a clear and present factor, but not the only one. Carter’s got a real gift for balancing romance with action in such a way that neither side of the coin gets boring and overblown, and that makes this one of the few YA novels with a romantic theme that I can actually read and properly enjoy.

While Carter does play a little fast and loose with Greek myths sometimes (though admittedly, most of the distortion actually has fairly valid justification, in context), she does make it plain that the Greek deities are far from monogamous. Everybody has slept with everybody else, and it was quite funny to see Kate try to come to grips with that. Also, I like the way that nearly all characters (barring Calliope/Hera) seem to be sympathetic ones. Even Persephone, portrayed somewhat as a self-centered bitch sometimes, has a side that we can relate to and understand a little more, and I like that. Her unwanted marriage to Hades didn’t warp her so much as made her rather bitter, which she is still able to work through when danger looms. It’s a very humanizing effect, and I enjoyed seeing the characters develop.

The book losing something, though, in that it isn’t particularly good at foreshadowing. Kate’s angsting about Henry is, I’m sure, meant to convince the reader that he really doesn’t like or love her as much as she loves him. This fails. His motivations and actions are fairly understandable, given who he is and what position he’s in. Ava’s possible betrayal at the end of the book makes sense if you look at her actions and words leading up to that moment, and I’m not sure why the reader is led in that direction to begin with, nor why Kate believe’s Callope’s accusations. On one hand, it speaks very highly of the author for being able to develop and write characters that I can get a clear and easy grasp on, right down to their between-the-lines motivations. On the other hand, as I said, it makes for somewhat weak attempts at foreshadowing.

Overall, I’d say that this book is a refreshingly mature YA romance novel, with a creative plot and excellent characters. it’s a fine follow-up to the first novel of the trilogy, and one that I definitely plan to continue with. If you don’t mind a little bit of mythological twisting or enjoy new takes on old tales, I definitely recommend this one.

(Received for review from the publisher via NetGalley.)

The Goddess Test, by Aimee Carter

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Author’s website
Publication date – April 19, 2011

Summary: (Taken from GoodReads) It’s always been just Kate and her mom—and her mother is dying. Her last wish? To move back to her childhood home. So Kate’s going to start at a new school with no friends, no other family and the fear her mother won’t live past the fall.

Then she meets Henry. Dark. Tortured. And mesmerizing. He claims to be Hades, god of the Underworld—and if she accepts his bargain, he’ll keep her mother alive while Kate tries to pass seven tests.

Kate is sure he’s crazy—until she sees him bring a girl back from the dead. Now saving her mother seems crazily possible. If she succeeds, she’ll become Henry’s future bride, and a goddess.

Thoughts: I would like to take a moment here to say just how surprised I was at how much I enjoyed this novel. I expected to at least like it, or else I wouldn’t have read it, but I didn’t expect to like it quite as much as I did. Carter did some amazing things with this novel that allowed it to not only have an appeal to those who really love their romance, but also for those who prefer their romance on the side, as a sub-plot rather than the main driving force. That is a hard balance to achieve, and that the author managed it is worthy of praise in itself.

The story centres around Kate, who is moving to her mother’s hometown in order to accommodate her mother’s last wishes to die in the place she spent her childhood. Kate’s struggle in coming to grips with the fact that her mother is dying before her eyes and doesn’t have long left to live is very keenly expressed through the story, the holding pattern between pain and loss grips the reader’s heart and helps establish a real connection with Kate as a character.

But her mother’s hometown, Eden, isn’t what it appears to be on the surface. Before long, Kate gets wrapped up in a complex and emotional plot after meeting a boy named Henry, and seeing him bring a girl back from the dead. Knowing that the story has heavy ties to Greek mythology, it’s no real surprise that Henry’s price for bringing Ava back to life is for Kate to re-enact the story of Persephone, and to live with him between the autumn and spring equinoxes. When Kate consents to pay this price, she discovers that this isn’t just a one-time deal, that Henry expects this to go on not just for the rest of Kate’s life but for eternity.

And that’s where things get really interesting!

Aimee Carter plays with Greek mythology in ways that make the tales spread far beyone the time that we associate with them, explaining that the gods have existed for all time, since before things had names, and even though they’re most popularly known by their Greek names, they frequently appear under other names, changing them as the times and places change. The gods are embodiments of concepts and ideas, and Carter takes the time to establish that they are not omnipotent and omniscient, that they are more human than people typically think of them. This, too, is nicely fitting with their expression in Greek myth, which is one of the things I have always loved about different mythologies. Gods as distant and untouchable beings have never appealed to me. Gods I can relate to, see reflections in, now they’re the ones I want to have around!

Ditto the concept of the afterlife that was played with in The Goddess Test. Not just one afterlife, but an afterlife shaped by the expectations of the dead, what they expect to have happen and what they deserve to have happen, helped along by judges who must know to judge fairly. I liked this, and in no small part because it matches my own views on such things.

Props to Carter as well for striking a fine balance in the character of Henry, also known as Hades. Which anyone who knows Greeky myths will know that Hades is not the Greek version of Satan and actually can be a sympathetic character, Henry’s character went beyond merely “sympathetic.” I thought more than once that it would have been very easy to turn Henry into a “pity me” kind of character, one who bemoans that history has maligned his image, one who feels deep grief over his appointed task, and who is essentially an emo boy. This was, happily, not the case. Henry could be loving and kind, but he could also be hard, cold, unflinching when he dished out his judgments.

But what is particularly noteworthy about this novel is the romance. I expected a book from Harlequin to do what I find so annoying in other books, for Kate to have her breath taken away by Henry and to spend the book pining after him and for the two of them to awkwardly discover their feelings for each other, etc. This was, delightfully, not the case. Kate doesn’t really start to feel much for Henry until the book’s half over. They kiss for the first time around the 75% mark. Most of Kate’s thoughts are taken up by her dying mother and her strange new life in a tiny piece of the land of the dead, and her developping attraction to Henry was slow and believable, taking place over the course of 4 or 5 months. I only wish that more teen romances would take this approach, as they’d be a lot more tolerable to read.

A nice twist to the established mythology, and update on what we think we know, and a delight to read, The Goddess Test exceeded my expectations, and I’m quite looking forward to reading the sequel. If it’s anything like this first book, I know I’m going to love it.

(Received for review from the publisher via NetGalley.)