Olympian Challenger

Synopsis

Even in a world of mythology and stories, fairytales don’t know always come true.

By releasing the Olympians, Hope took a reckless bet. But she must face the odds and play to win, for her sake…as well as humanity’s.
Aided by her friends and allies — old and new — Hope crafts the trap meant to ensnare the gods, while striving to survive this dangerous game.

She once championed the Olympian gods. Now, she must challenge them.

Read Olympian Reckoning now to discover the ending to Hope’s heroic journey!

Review

I’ll cite something from the book without any context for avoiding spoilers, but I need to comment this:

Kieron loved me fast and hard, probably a result of a life starved from hope.

Kieron needed “Hope” in his life…

I’m sorry, now the real review…

This book kicks off right where the last one ended. Hope and Kieron are imprisoned in Olympus, with Kieron being punished day and night by his father.

Everything was part of Hope’s plan. She would be captured by Hermes to set a trap for the gods. The problem is that she didn’t have time to update Kieron, so he tried to defend her from Hermes and ended up captured with her.

As if that wasn’t enough, Hope still owes the Pythia an unknown favor. As it couldn’t be otherwise, the favor the Pythia wants from Hope is that she becomes her replacement, so that she can finally rest. This implies for Hope to live forever as a toy of the gods, in addition to living in celibacy. Although this last part is not that relevant because Kieron, after discovering that he had been captured for Hope’s plan, got fed up with her and left.

Kieron doesn’t seem moved by my declaration… “You’re not some selfless martyr, Hope. You’re a narcissistic little girl with a hero complex.”

Even if Kieron was clearly upset and exaggerated a little about Hope, I do agree that she has a huge hero complex. Since the first book it was clear she can’t avoid helping others, and she feels all the weight of the gods is in her shoulders. Although she may not be so wrong about this.

I never mean to rush into trouble headfirst. It’s not my fault if trouble always seems to find me.

At least Hope’s initial plan worked, the gods drank her tears restoring their immortality and cracking the Fabric that got them caught in Olympus. But drinking her tears they became vulnerable, now they can be killed. The new problem is that killing the gods, so they don’t murder humans, is unuseful. If the principal gods die, the world dies with them. It is necessary to intimidate them and find a prison in case they don’t want to surrender. Easy right?

Billions of lives depend on me, a clueless teenager with no self-preservation instinct.

One of the options to imprison the gods is contacting Thetis who, at Hope’s own request, isn’t answering the contact attempts. The only other option is the Underworld, which implies asking Hades for help… This option seems pretty impossible as it is, and Kieron keeps refusing to ask his father for help.

The Pythia said “Hades is a powerful god. He is perhaps the only Olympian capable of taking on Zeus.”

“It doesn’t seem that way. His siblings despise him.” I point out. “Why?”

“Because Hades, for all his flaws, has something they never had–“

I snort. “A black, black heart?”

“No, girl. Hades hasn’t lost his ability to care.”

Hope must find the prison for the gods, in addition to gathering all possible allies. Kieron remains her ally even though they are no longer together.
At least Hope has Gabriel, Eros, Amy and the heroes who “trained” them for the competition. But she also has her mother at last, already cured of the demigods disease. Teresa is an extraordinary woman, very overprotective and not afraid of the gods. I think the funniest parts of the book are thanks to her.
Also, by some chance, Hope is reunited with Lily, her best friend.

I huddle close to her, feeling happier and more at peace than I have in years… No one that I love has died in weeks — life is good.

And here… as it couldn’t be other way, I was right and Heath is back. Now he is Kieron’s shadow and apparently Lily’s new boyfriend target.
To be honest he’s not so bad now. He clearly suffered a lot and is trying to fic his mistakes, but I really don’t like this character.

I honestly enjoyed this book and I managed to get into the story a lot more than the other two. However, the end disappointed me horribly. The worst of this is that it’s not a bad ending. On contrary, for me the idea was excellent, but it’s too incomplete.
I felt that only Hope got a proper ending, while the rest of the characters were ignored and we don’t know what happened with them.

[su_spoiler title=”Here are a few huge spoilers of the end of the book, don’t open this if you haven’t read it.” icon=”chevron-circle”]I felt the war got stuck right in the middle, it didn’t finish. At least the things could have been explained later, for example, when Hope read the newspaper.
Hope’s death felt like a good idea. In the end it gave Hope and Kieron the eternity they wished to have. Although I don’t get the point of Hope being indestructible.
Eros’s death… Felt awfully unnecessary for me. It may have been useful for Aphrodite to surrender, but I felt this needed more developing.
And, above all, Hope died and at least her mother is fine but, what about Lily? And Gabriel, that lost his boyfriend and best friend? And Amy as the new Pythia? Hope could have asked for them at least. It was like they didn’t matter anymore.

[/su_spoiler]

For me this book deserves 3 stars. Deciding this was extremely hard because I have mixed feelings.
I love the plot, love the characters, love Astrid, I even love the covers. But maybe is precisely the reason I wasn’t satisfied with the end.
I still recommend this book and I enjoyed a lot reading it as I felt it wasn’t predictable, it has some funny parts, some romance and, of course, mythology that fascinates me.
It just left me with a bad taste because I feel that if the end had had a couple more chapters it would have been much better and deserved at least 4.5 stars.

Bye bye ?

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Synopsis

A newly-crowned Greek heroine. An impossible search for eternal life.
If her godly quest succeeds, she may just doom humanity.
Hope always kept her feet on the ground until she started flying with the Greek gods. After being crowned the new heroine of Olympus, she’s become her own myth and legend. But when the gods give Hope a challenge to find the goddess of eternal life, she’s caught in a deadly dilemma.

As she travels back to the earthly realm to fulfill her mission, Hope knows that carrying out her task would sacrifice humanity.
But when she discovers her own mysterious legacy, her choices become that much more complicated.

Olympian Heritage is the second book in the Olympic Challenger series of YA urban fantasy trilogy that fans of Rick Riordan and Suzanne Collins are sure to devour.
If you like heroic quests, riveting action, Greek mythology, forbidden romance, and feats of courage, then you’ll love Astrid Arditi’s heroic coming-of-age tale.

Review

I must start this review with a confession: This is the second time I read this book.
The first time I read it I didn’t like it. I never felt it was a bad story, but I felt nothing. However, the truth is that, in that moment, I read the book extremely fast and I didn’t want my opinion to be influenced by this. So I decided to give this book a second chance when the third one came out.

Hope has won the gods challenge. Now, for proving her loyalty as their champion, she’s forced to fulfill a new mission on Earth. Finding Hebe, daughter of Zeus who was kidnapped just before the divide and with the fount of youth.

For this mission, Hope is accompanied by Eros, Gabriel and Amy. Kieron promises he will accompany her through the shadows, but Hope is furious with him and as she doesn’t see him on Earth, she gets even more upset. Besides, she has forbidden coming close to her mother, who believes her daughter abandoned her… The little times she’s lucid enough.

With many new creatures and powers, Hope finds unexpected allies. From Amazons, Centaurs, even a god, Raiden.

Raiden turns out way too useful and he always know where to find Hope, which is something suspicious. Although it may be that Hope is too predictable, as there’s a weird man with blue eyes waiting her in every place and saying they need to talk.

If it wasn’t enough with the stalkers, now Hope seems to be in the middle of a teenager crisis that causes her uncontrollable crying. But, maybe it’s not a simple crisis…

Hope finds out that everything she though she knew was a lie, and she’s forced to take a decision that doesn’t have a correct answer.

Again, we find different myths or interesting stories from the secondary characters like Persephone, also there are new characters pretty interesting.
There also seem to be many subplots that intertwine as the story progresses. But then, why didn’t I love it?

This is a question I can’t answer. There’s one thing in this story that deeply bothered me and it’s the anger of Hope against Kieron. No matter how many times I re-read or the effort I did, I couldn’t understand Kieron’s betrayal. Out of that the story is good, however, I never felt compelled not to drop the book.

For me this book deserves 3.5/5 stars. However, I can’t avoid recommending it as I loved the first part and I still like the base plot. I have faith that the last book will compensate all the feelings that this one didn’t give me. I repeat, it’s not a bad book, it just disappointed me a little (You don’t know how it hurts me not giving it more stars ?).

Bye bye ?

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