The Dark Wife by Sarah Diemer

Dany: I don’t remember. I read this over a month ago and… x_x Not much stuck.
Rosey: such a recommendation 😉

Dany: To be quite frank, I thought it was badly written and Persephone spent at least a hundred pages fawning over Hades’ beauty and (lack of) personality.
Rosey: Yeah. I didn’t get any sense of story. It was just “oh I’m in love with Hades” and even that I didn’t really understand cause there was nothing to Hades that made her special except this “greek mythology” stuff.
Dany: well, she was SO KIND and giving and argh
Rosey: *eye roll* zero flaws! She’s been persecuted for so long! Zeus has spread ALL THESE LIES. No basis in truth, so everyone TOTALLY believes him.
Dany: Yeah, the book… It was a mess. I mean, YAY for lgbt romance but the characters were flat, the plot was lacking. Also, the things that could have been interesting happened off-screen, while Persephone was biding her time in the underworld and Hades was off doing things.
Rosey: Yuuuup. I almost wish this had been told from Hades POV, except not by this author.

Rosey: Oh man, ALSO all the mythology stuff was SO annoying.

Rosey: Like gods having souls and ugh, just general annoyance with the way she treated greek myth — all to make Persephone and Hades perfect. The nice thing about Greek myth is that the gods are so human and not personifications of evil. It was also a little hamy and forced.
Dany: Yes, it was. It was just irritating how evil Zeus was, and how good Persephone and Hades were.
Rosey: It made them so dull and I didn’t want to root for them. I just didn’t care. And it was super weird how Demeter, one of these five original gods, just did what Zeus wanted of her… Something about it just felt slimy and I don’t think that was the point. I think it was supposed to be “look at Persephone DEFENDING her mother”.
Dany: Yeah, it just didn’t seem believable to me that no one would try and stand up against Zeus properly.
Rosey: Until Persephone. Especially since everyone apparently hated him? and like Demeter was all “There’s a group of us who will meet!” so they were… waiting for Persephone to come?
Dany: I remember being especially irked by Hades, mostly because you can write so many cool things about Hades and the underworld but all we got was… this. And also, Persephone in the underworld? Again, SO MANY GREAT THINGS YOU COULD DO. SO MANY.

Dany: Persephone lacked motivation for so much of the book.

Dany: And I hate to read about that. I don’t have to like the MC of a book but I have to at least understand why that character is the MC of the book. What makes them worthy of being in the center of a story? Why should I pay attention to them? And the Dark Wife never answered these questions for me. I’m not sure why I should have found this story interesting. Because Hades was a woman, and it’s about lesbians? I’m sorry, but that is not enough. I want characters I can root for, gdi.
Rosey: Right!? I mean, not that this has to be representative of lgbt romance but come on! It can’t be that hard. I kept on trying to figure out if the book was self published. It felt like no one had looked at it and been like “this needs more work”. Not that self publishing is bad, but that might also have been because the formatting on the book was all wrong x___x; /superficial reasons
Dany: I thiiiink it is self published, yes.

Rosey: Anyways, it was just… weak and lacking and I didn’t even want more because of that, so I don’t know if there’s anything else to say on it.
Dany: I’m not sure either. It could have been great, but it wasn’t.
Rosey: Yup. it was just…what it was.

Dany’s rating: 2/5 stars
Rosey’s rating: 2.5/5 stars