Sorry Hercules. We need to see other people.
Blood of Hercules by Jasmine Mas was August’s pick for the Rusty Book Club, and I made it to page 152 of 460 before admitting defeat.
I was bored to tears.
And here's the frustrating part: I don't think the problem was the premise. Alexis is determined to be Spartan through a blood test of sorts, and there’s fighting, danger, insults, mythology, and plenty of things that should have made this interesting. The world-building wasn't particularly difficult to follow, and I didn't actively dislike Alexis.
I just didn't care.
By page 152, I should have been invested in something. Instead, people fought. People insulted each other. Things happened. Yada, yada, yada. I kept waiting for the moment when the story would grab me, and it never did.
The writing didn't help. The prose felt surprisingly juvenile to me, almost like something written at a sixth-grade reading level, except with cussing thrown in. There is nothing inherently wrong with simple prose, and profanity usually doesn't bother me, but here it sometimes felt as though the author had just discovered cuss words and was determined to try them all out.
The humor didn't land for me, either. At all. In fact, I was surprised to find out it was supposed to be funny. What was apparently intended as funny or edgy banter mostly made me wonder how many pages I had left.
Way too many, as it turned out.
I hadn't even reached the romance portion of the story yet, which I know is a significant part of the book. Maybe that's where everything changes. Maybe another hundred pages would have completely won me over. But I have a personal rule about reading: a book has to give me a reason to keep turning the pages. I had already given Blood of Hercules 152 of them, and I still wasn't curious about what happened next.
That's my signal to stop.
This clearly has an audience, particularly readers who enjoy dark romantasy, mythology-inspired stories, irreverent humor, lots of banter, and plenty of profanity. I am simply not that audience.
On a positive note, I thought the cover was nice.
