Review--The Things Gods Break by Abigail Owen

 

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THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The gods want her dead...Hades will bury them.

You’d think I’d have learned by now:
Don’t mouth off to deities.
Don’t fall for the King of the Underworld.
And definitely don’t get dragged into a divine death match where I’m the cursed mortal prize.

But here I am―trapped in Tartarus, humanity’s worst pit stop, squaring off against monsters who make the gods look merciful. Titans, twisted by centuries of rage and ruin, are sealed behind seven ancient locks.

And guess what?

I'm the key.

To escape, I’ll have to survive every horrifying trial they throw at me.

To win, I might have to become something the gods never saw coming.

Oh, and Hades?

He's about to break every rule the gods ever wrote.

Because to save me...the god of death will burn the world.

But if I break free? So do the Titans.

And the world won’t just suffer―it'll beg for the end.

Abigail Owen's The Things Gods Break is the second installment in The Crucible trilogy and, I won't lie it was pretty complex and trippy! Remember the fifth season of LOST? It reminded me of that and THAT particular season made me so...lost! Lol.

So be prepared for a series of confusing events, unless you've got that eagle eye for time jumps and trips and all that jazz when it comes to time-traveling. Buckle up kiddos, it's going to be a bumpy ride!

When attempting to rescue Persephone from Tartartus, things go horribly wrong and Lyra is sucked into the gate before we can even see Persephone and it's shut closed, locking her inside with the Titans who were imprisoned eons ago by their children, the Greek gods that we all know.

Lyra soon learns that she will have to complete twelve different challenges to unseal a magical Lock to unlock the door of Tartartus, freeing her, Persephone, and Boone who was also sucked through the portal when the door opened. The challenges will be even more daunting than the ones she had to face in the Crucible as they will test her mental and physical endurance as well as emotional.

This book was so trippy! I was down with things in the beginning, a new set of challenges that need to be completed, a greater challenge of escaping Tartarus is set before Lyra and Boone. At least this time she isn't alone, but then come these rips in time which seem to always be on the move and Lyra finds herself falling through them at the most inopportune moments. Which seriously, if you blink, you might miss it and wonder what is Lyra doing now when she was just facing some big bad thing a moment ago? It's that quick!

These jumps in time soon start to paint another picture which becomes even more illuminating! All these answers start falling into place to questions we didn't even realize we had! It was mind-blowing! We do still get to see Hades in some aspect. It's not the Hades of the present day, but many past Hades from each rip in time Lyra visits. I was taking notes as I usually do throughout reading and I still couldn't quite keep the puzzle pieces aligned.

By the end though, I did see the bigger picture! There's still some mystery that needs to be solved which will come along in the finale, but just whoa. This book was definitely heavy and discombobulating! If I hadn't already been invested in the series I might have given into DNFing, but while I suffered from great confusion, I still persevered! I actually never finished LOST up until a couple of years ago. Like maybe 5-6 years after it ended? That season 5 still tripped me up but at least with binge watching I was able to better follow along! Which is how I managed to get through this one!

Despite the rocky start and up and down struggle throughout this one, I did still enjoy myself. The story was still exciting, it was just some of those scene transitions that were hard to catch and it really me threw me sometimes and it took a bit to get back on track. But I always did, eventually!

The ending was quite a gamechanger! I was not expecting this kind of ending, a cliffhanger yes, but nowhere near the one that we got! Time travel does tend to mess with the mind and comprehension, for me at least, and while that did happen here, I was still pretty much entertained for the course of the novel. There was quite a jaw-dropper of an epilogue too that had me reeling! Definitely looking forward to revisiting that in the finale!

Needless to say, if you're invested in this series, you've probably already read this and I am behind like always! Lol. But if you're looking for a new Hades/Persephone myth retelling that doesn't involve Persephone in the romantic sense, be sure to check The Crucible trilogy out! It may be a head-spinner but it's definitely an exhilarating one!

Overall Rating 3.5/5 stars