Bookends About Awaken

Title: Awaken
Editor: Meg Cabot
Source: from publisher for review
Rating: ★★★★☆
Series: Abandon|Underworld|Awaken
Review Summary: As usual, Meg Cabot has written a fun, light read about an admirable and unique protagonist.

Earlier in this Persephone/Hades myth based trilogy, John (Hades) and Peirce (Persephone) made a decision that has imbalanced the forces ruling the underworld. Having finally (mostly) worked out their relationship, Peirce is suddenly faced with the possibility of losing John because of this imbalance. As she tries to rescue him and restore balance to the underworld, she’ll have to take advantage of all the connections and cool powers that come with being the queen of the underworld. And it will be awesome.

Bookends About Abandon

Title: Abandon
Author: Meg Cabot
Source: bought for book signing
Rating: ★★★★☆
Review Summary: In a lot of ways this is a fairly typical YA romance with a strong heroine, but it’s also well written, enjoyable, and made unique by its’ basis in mythology and the heroine’s unique voice.

Like Dead Beautiful, Meg Cabot’s Abandon trilogy is a re-telling of the Persephone myth, although in this case only the starting point of the story really comes from the myth. The Greek gods aren’t part of the story at all and while a lot of elements of the Greek underworld are used, even the basic explanation for the way the Underworld works is different. What is the same is that the lord of the underworld does fall in love with our heroine, Pierce. He does kidnap her, in a way, but in his defense she’s already dead in this version. She manages to escape and is resuscitated by her doctors; which of these events is the cause and which the effect is left for the reader to determine. Unfortunately for Pierce, escaping the underworld doesn’t resolve anything.  She now has trouble fitting back into her old life and still has to deal with the lord of the underworld appearing to “help” her, usually causing her some trouble himself as well.

Dead Beautiful – Review and Giveaway

Title: Dead Beautiful
Author: Melanie Dugan
Source: from publisher for a TLC Book Tour
Rating: ★★★★☆
Review Summary: Fun, enjoyable re-telling of the Persephone myth.  Original enough to be interesting, true enough to the myth to have that extra level of awesome added by the parallels between the two stories.  Well written with each character having a unique voice.

For those of you who don’t know the Persephone myth, a quick recap: Persephone, daughter of the Greek goddess of of the harvest, is abducted by Hades, the Greek god of the dead.  Before she is rescued by her mother Demeter, she eats six pomegranate seeds.  As a result, she is required to spend six months of every year with Hades and her mother is so distraught during those times that she neglects her job as goddess of the harvest and we have fall and winter.  In Dead Beautiful, Melanie Dugan considers the possibility that Persephone wasn’t abducted after all but was just a rebellious teen who fell in love with Hades and didn’t have the courage to tell her mom.

Bookends: Percy Jackson and More Percy Jackson

In what is definitely the sign of a good series, I have spent the week diving into one Percy Jackson book after another.  I’m currently in the middle of the fourth book in the series, The Battle of the Labyrinth, and am already looking for another YA series to fill the void in my life that will be left when I finish the fifth and last book!  Suggestions are welcome 🙂  Wonderfully, I haven’t noted a decline in quality of the books as the series has progressed and I’ve found the feel of the books to be mostly the same as the first one, so I won’t be doing complete reviews for each but would happily give the whole series 4 stars and highly recommend them!