Katkemm

This book was won through Goodreads First Reads.

Oracles are popular topics in fantasy. They can be intriguing characters or plot devices (used to varying degrees of creativity and success). They are walking metaphors. Oracles are very difficult to do correctly.

They were not the best choice for a first novel. This book is a mess, and would have benefited enormously from a modicum of effort and editing.

While being billed as a historical romance, there was clearly zero research done on the time period. The author clearly relied solely on her fantasies for this book. Monotheistic practices and Christian religious figures creep into the Greek pantheon. Why on earth would a well-educated oracle of Apollo not know the rest of the pantheon she grew up worshiping? Why is Apollo associated with love in this novel, rather than the traditional and more accurate spheres of music, sun, archery, and healing? Oh, because Apollo is a stand-in for the Christian God.

There is zero showing in this novel. Settings and events are never described or illustrated to us. We are told everything with zero subtlety, detail, or nuance. There is no world-building. Some characters---recurring characters that influence the story---are never even given a name. It feels flat, rushed, lazy. This is billed as a romance, but there is none. We have all of one scene of the lovers saying goodbye, at the very beginning of the book. They say bye. We never see the relationship before or after that, and the separation is peaceable. There's no drama. She does talk a lot of how she and he have a 'special love.' I'll have to take her word on it, because I didn't sympathize or empathize with the couple at all. Particularly when the main character has permission to see him and chooses not to for some ineffable reason.

The characters are all carbon copies of each other. There was little description of what they looked like, little interaction, and pretty much no differentiation between them. No one had their own voice. The dialogue is stilted, unnatural, and unrealistic. There is flip-flopping between hyperformal tones and giggly high school girl, loads of repetition, stating things just to state them---"As we all know, "--- and an insistence of using names in every sentence. There were many, many anachronisms in the book. Vibe, Inch, Lucid Dreaming, and Nerd don't fit ancient Greece. 'Download' sure as hell doesn't. I doubt they'd mark their calendar years in 'BC,' either. It immediately throws me out of the book. There are men in the book, but no women. No, there are only 'females.' "I don't feel comfortable talking to a female." Its like reading a PUA handbook. There are pages and pages that are entirely sentence fragments of the same tired guided meditation phrases you can find in every New Age store. "Let the thoughts pass all the way through...thoughts are not substance...allow your breathing to deepen...". Pages of it. Then the main character talks about how awesome it felt. Maybe this could be done once, to show what the 'classes' are. But no, this is over and over. Its atrocious page filler that does not build anything for a story.

There's this odd sexual obsession in the book. The girls talk about, not sex, but body parts in this odd, disjointed, technical way. One girl discusses the attractiveness of a man's glutes. Not his ass or his body. His glutes. Girls discuss breasts constantly. "Your breasts are enormous!" "I band my breasts for I prefer small breasts." "You should not bind your breasts, for they are enormous!" Breast chat is only superseded by virginity chat and marriage chat.

There's no real plot. Its all on the back of the book. There is no climax, no twists or surprises, no building tension. There's just nothing. Its like reading a girl's diary, except the girl herself isn't even all that interested.

What does the book have going for it? Its short. Its quick. It is non-linear. There's enthusiasm behind it, at least. I laughed a lot when reading it.

TL;DR: A historical romance novel without history, relationships, setting, emotion, characters, or plot.… (más)