Book Review : The Dark Wife

★★★☆☆

I’m still so bitter over this book because it had so much potential and it turned out a bit bland.

I’ve read this book for #sapphicathon and it was the first book I’ve finished for this readathon. I was excited about reading a Hades/Persephone f/f retelling. I thought fem!Hades would be the most badass and amazing thing because I’ve always thought it unfair that neither of the three strongest gods from Olympus is a woman. This book was changing things and I adored the idea, but the execution was bad.

Good Things :

• f/f romance that was very cute and it was a slow-burn too!!! I just really loved how fluffy everything was.
• Hades was pretty amazing and I adored her character.
• Zeus was slammed up pretty badly by the narrative and by the main characters. I hate Zeus, I hate how he always gets what he wants, I hate how many unaddressed rapes are in mythology just because the gods are almighty and all powerful and they deserve to be forgiven because they do other good things.
• The Underworld was very different from the mythology, which was pretty original and I liked how the dead were important in the narrative.

 

Bad Things :

• Persephone was very childish, at times and I feel like some plotlines made little sense. Hades was so much more badass and she was the goddess of the Underworld, yet she hadn’t figured out some very obvious things about the dead. Yet Persephone who had nothing to do with this realm, was the Chosen One, the one who can change it all. It felt like too much at times.
• Athena was put in a bad light and I hated it because she’s my favourite goddess ever and she didn’t deserve to be pictured as an insensitive person.
• Not a lot of plotline. The lack of plot was so obvious that it annoyed me so much.
• At some point, everything felt so slow that I got a bit bored and yeah. This book is the kind where nothing happens for most of the book and then you’re so bored that you barely care anymore when something does happen.

 

All in all, it was a very interesting and complex idea, but for me, it didn’t work out.

Did you read this book? Did you like it?

 

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