Asterion (The Court of the Underworld, #1)

by Alessa Thorn

[Caitiebelle]

I really liked this book and where the story is going - the author has caught my attention and I really feel like I want to read more of her books.

I haven't read that many takes on the greek myths in a modern setting, but this wasn't bad. I loved Asterion, he's perfect - but sadly Ariadne just falls short for me.
Don't get me wrong, she's got many good characteristics and she's absolutely perfect for Asterion. The issue I have is that she's written so epically good at what she does - you would never think she was mortal. Which is a problem, when said character IS "just" a mortal.
Yes, she's an assassin, she's a great one at that - and trained kind of like the old Spartan schools where you either were the best or you died.
But she's also like five foot nothing and 100lbs - let's try to at least be slightly realistic, there is no way this small mortal female can do any type of hand-to-hand combat with a grown ass 6,5 foot 280lb fully trained (and we are talking trained by gods type of trained) man.
It's just not going to happen. That's a "kick him in the balls and run" situation, that's been proven several times, it's just not physically possible.
I'm all for her doing damage - and yes when she's being a full assassin and getting the jump on people, coming out of the shadows etc etc, perfect and I love it and yes she would def. be able to do her thing. But not if she's the full-on focus.
And this just kept happening. She was written to be so good, she's better than gods and superheroes, and that got to me a little bit. It was just "too good" you know?

The other thing that brings the book down, is that this is a repeating problem in the series because I've read the first 4 books as I'm writing this and that is the editing. Now, the editing is not terrible. But it's not very good, and it could be miles better. There are consistently missing words, way more than there should be allowed to be. By that I mean when I am on double digits in a book, that's way too many. And that's for each book., not the whole series.
There is also the problem of sentences starting with the FMC name, again and again just a paragraph under or on the same page. This is a big no no, and it gets annoying. It's not a good sentence structure and it takes away from the content a bit, because I kept getting annoyed about it.

So as much as I loved the story about Asterion and I loved the settings of the book etc all this dragged this book down to three stars for me.