Neon Gods

"Neon Gods" by Katee Robert is another Hades and Persephone romance in a modern setting. I'm falling somewhere in the middle on this one. It has some things that I really like and somethings that really bother me.

I love the characters in this novel. Everyone has unique personalities and feels like a complete person. Even the villains have nuanced and understandable motivations. I really liked this take on Persephone, too. The story is about her freedom and pulls more themes from the traditional legend than the women's version, but Persephone still has agency and controls her own narrative.

I really love the concept of making the Greek names titles that control different aspects of running Olympus rather than writing about actual gods. However, it also raises some other questions for me through out the book. This isn't a major issue, just one of those little things that's slightly bothersome, and I have to work to ignore it. For instance, the core 13 who run the city get their names from assuming their titles, including Zeus, Hades, and Demeter. So why is it that the families around those people are named according to the myths but other townsfolk aren't. Persephone is Demeter's daughter before Demeter was elected to be Demeter. Zeus's sons are Hercules and Perseus. Hades' head of security is Charon. The townspeople we interact with are Matthew, Juliette, and Gayle. Why?

Though I am generally a character focused reader, it is the world building, or lack thereof, that throws this book off for me. Olympus is a city that exists separate from the rest of the world. Fine, I can get on board with that. The city seems to be located somewhere in America. That makes no sense to me. It was incredibly jarring to be knee deep in a Greek myth centered book and then have them talk about Ohio. Plus, there is no explanation for how the city operates in relation to the rest of the world. There are magical barriers separating the city from the rest of the world and separating the lower city from the upper city, but the existence of those barriers is not explained. Our characters are human, so who set up these barriers, who controls them, and why does everyone just accept them? It's mentioned that the border within the city (at the River Styx, of course) allows people to pass if they have an invitation from Hades, but how any of that works is never addressed.

The last main concept to discuss is the sex. I am fine with any amount of sex an author wants to include in their book, including zero, but I want it to fit with the narrative the same as any other story element. The sex scenes are well written, and I have no problem with them in a general sense. What bothered me is the content. The very first thing that the reader learns about Hades as a person is that he's a dominant who enjoys kink and has a playroom, and a main story theme is Persephone exploring her fantasies and learning more about herself, but the only kink in the book is exhibitionism and a brief mention of bondage. Just like with any other topic, it is upsetting (and in some cases damaging) to read scene play depicted wrong. If other kink elements were avoided because the author didn't want to portray them incorrectly, I appreciate the thought behind that, but if that's the case, don't include the scene as a main theme of your book. I did appreciate her pointing out how ridiculous the society's puritanical views on sex were, though.

All in all, I would say this is a good book, but it's not great. It has great characters and a good, if anticlimactic, story. At this point, I don't know if I will read the next book in the series when it comes out. I might check out the author's other works, though.