A Touch of Darkness

The "A Touch of Darkness" series by Scarlett St. Clair is a Hades and Persephone erotic romance set in more modern day. I have a soft spot for the couple and enjoy the books, though I won't say they need to be on anyone's must read list.

My favorite aspect is that St. Clair is telling the story twice. One set of books, starting with "A Touch of Darkness," is from Persephone's point of view, and another set of books, starting with "A Game of Fate," is from Hades' point of view. They aren't complete yet, but it seems like the last book or two will alternate between the two perspectives and tie the two series together; the information at this point seems to suggest that there will be one book that will serve as book 4 for each series. I will say that I think they suffer a bit from the typical self-publication issue of needing an editor, but I plan to keep reading them.

The thing I keep circling back to is that I prefer the story from Hades' perspective. While I love that St. Clair uses the women's tale version of Hades and Persephone, where the story is more about love and Persephone learning to be her own person and get out from under her mothers' thumb, I find that Persephone's story doesn't explore or explain her psychology enough or properly account for the character development St. Clair seems to be going for.

In the legend, Persephone spent a large portion of her life completely sheltered by her mother, with love being something that was used as leverage for compliance. So, for a broad character arc, it makes sense for Persephone to go from a dependent child, to a guided/codependent relationship, to powerful in her own right, which seems to be what's happening overall with this series. However, it feels to me like her character shifts a bit suddenly from one stage to the next without much development, while her personality/voice stays fairly rooted in the child stage. So, Persephone comes off as whiny more often than not. That didn't bother me much at all in the beginning, because it fit her character as a sheltered/abused child trying to learn to navigate on her own, but as the series goes on her actions shift and her personality doesn't, making it feel more and more contradictory and annoying. And people don't change overnight, so I can understand dipping back into that as she develops, but I felt Hades and Persephone needed to have more conversations as a couple or chats with the established side characters (who they go to for help/council in other ways) about what was going on and use those moments to build growth.

All that to say, I have background knowledge that helps me justify and understand Persephone's character in these books (and I believe it's clear that so does St. Clair), but I don't think it was effectively communicated in the books so much as assumed the reader would know, too. That generally leads to me preferring to read the story from Hades' perspective because reading the whole thing in Persephone's voice can be a bit much.

I do quite enjoy these books; they have a lot of good things going for them. The ones that are out I have read several times, and I definitely plan to read the rest as they're published, too.