Review: The Games Gods Play (Crucible #1) by Abigail Owen
Percy Jackson for adults meets The Hunger Games with a slow burn romance between a contestant and Hades himself.
Every hundred years, the gods toy with us mere mortals. And we let them.
The gods of myth are alive and well.
Once every century, they select a new ruler in a cutthroat competition, pushing mortal players to the limit. But this year, Hades is done sitting on the sidelines. And he’s picking a champion no one expects—in this modern mythic romantasy, she’ll fight for her life…
for the god of Death.
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Review:
If the world in the story is the modern world, I would like to see the reason why Greek Gods are actually present in this world and yes, it is possible to incorporate all kind of Gods in the “our” world and do it well I do not believe this story did that.
There is a temple of Zeus in San Francisco and people who believe in Greek Gods and the reader is asked to just deal with it pretty much.
I tried hard to just follow along with the main premise because I actually thought that the idea of the Tournament where mortals play as Champions of their Gods (despite strong “Hunger Games” vibes) was actually well aligned with the source in a way. Because we all know that Greek Gods loved to amuse themselves by meddling with mortals from the beginning of their times. Let’s just glance at Homer’s “Iliad” to see one of the prime examples of such meddling. Gods do not want to fight themselves so let us have mortals do that.
So the idea of the Tournament where the stakes are ‘winner takes Olympus,’ only each God chooses a mortal to play (to death if needed) in their stead actually appealed to me. The actual tournament was fun and I enjoyed watching all the action.
Moreover references to myths were being made here and there, so that was fun. I just did not feel like the entities that were shown to us made much sense as Olympians. Again, I realize that especially when one plays with Greek Gods there is a line to walk since they did like to “entertain” themselves with mortals so to speak, but to me Hades in this book just does not act like a God most of the times. He (as I said for the most part) acted as a young man in love to me.
You would ask what about Persephone? The twist with her was not quite what I thought it was, but still Hades is free to pursue Lyra (albeit for a little different reason than I thought). Persephone can’t stop him.
Lyra is a strange main character, who to me acted several years younger than her actual age in the story (23). Actually as the story went along I even debated whether she was a Mary Sue Type because she did not win every single Labor of the Tournament (even if she prevailed at the end and even that came with some interesting qualifiers) and her appearance did not seem the prettiest of them all.
However, I decided that she was a Mary Sue type even if I had seen much worse ones for several spoiler reasons. As I said, this book one and the ending is a cliff hanger. C
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