Marked by Hades (Entangled Embrace) (Bound by Hades, #2)

by Reese Monroe

[Angie]

I received an ARC through NetGalley.

I did not enjoy Marked by Hades as much as the first book at all. It's actually quite boring, as well as jumpy. It also felt much longer than it is. This time we're following Theo's companion, Justin, as he finally finds his mate. Yvonne wakes up, naked in the park, with no memories of who she is or how she got there. A older man finds her and offers to take her to the hospital, when they accidentally touch, he turns to dust. Needless to say, this freaks her out, but luckily Justin finds her a few weeks later right when she turns a bad guy to dust.

I was immediately a bit annoyed with Marked by Hades because of Yvonne's ability. She apparently has some strange urge to touch people, all the time. Just because. Of course, this is a problem since her touch is deadly. Why her touch kills is explained later in the book, so I won't spoil that, but her need to touch all the time was because she was an empath. I was totally not buying that excuse. She's not just touchy feely, she compulsively needs to touch people, or have sex with them. I think that was done just to rank up the sexual tension between her and Justin, since she desperately wants to "make love" upon meeting him, but can't because she's deadly. Whatever.

Marked by Hades was also plagued by the dreaded time jumps. I hate time jumps, even though they're probably necessary to avoid the boring stuff. Something exciting would happen, and then time jump. Then something else would happen, and time jump! They were several weeks at a time, too. Plus this is what made the story seem so long. The plot would shift every time we moved forward in time. Something would happen, get resolved, then something else would come up, and get resolved. I started to lose interest after the third transition.

I still enjoyed the mythology used in this series, but Marked by Hades wasn't nearly as compelling as Forged by Fate. A lot things were overly cheesy and made me roll my eyes. The plot also took too many detours to reach it's destination, which had me bored. Also, a lot of scenes felt like they were taken straight out of the first book but with the names changed.

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.