A review by oddduck
Pandora Gets Greedy by Carolyn Hennesy

3.0

There were a number of really bizarre choices made for this installment that just did not work for me.

For book six out of seven, from a series that has demonstrated numerous times that it isn't afraid to get a bit dark, this book just felt really. . . off. By this point, Pandy and her friends are getting pretty good at capturing the evils. So why do they just kind of hang out for three whole weeks? Pandy says that she’s tired, which I get - they’ve been going pretty nonstop for almost five months and they’ve covered thousands of miles. Also they’re 13. What I’m a little confused by is the depression she seems to fall into during that time. She seems to just. . . give up? I kept thinking there had to be something else going on - maybe a god was interfering and twisting her emotions to prevent her from succeeding or something - but we really don’t get any kind of explanation. She’s just tired. Regardless, it seems really out of place to me. I knew within a few pages of meeting Lucius Valerius that he was being affected by Greed, so how did the entire group miss the signs? I can buy them not figuring out where Greed was hiding (I didn’t figure that out until much later) but they’ve been so good at identifying when someone is under the effects of an evil before that I just cannot understand what happened here.

I'm also not buying the "well we didn't think you'd notice" excuse for the time travel. It feels lazy and like the author didn't really want to deal with it. We already did time travel, so it's not like this is a new concept to us. Literally all it would have taken was for Hermes to tell them that Greed was a decade in the future at the end of the last book (and then probably a little reminder early in this book too). That's it. I just don't see any reason for why it wasn't done like this, aside from manufactured drama??

The way Rufina was treated was also abhorrent. She’s not a nice character and that’s fine,
but to have two goddesses of beauty make her obese just because she’s bratty and entitled is despicable.

And the end. Good lord the end. Specifically the very last chapter when
Pandy and co briefly see that Hera and Juno are being spanked by Zeus and Jupiter as punishment for their plot to overthrow Caesar and then their husbands.
It feels like a disservice to the readers, honestly, as well as to the source material. I've mentioned in several reviews of the previous books that I was surprised by some of the darker and more gruesome things that happened, so tonally, this series has no issue getting a bit dark. Which makes this "punishment" a complete joke. And considering some of the punishments in the original myths - yes, even for the gods - I just don't even have words to express how disappointing I found this. I get that we need Hera around for one more book so chaining her up in Tartarus or whatever isn't really a viable option yet, but that was the best we could do? Seriously? It's just such a childish choice which feels especially out of place as Pandy and her friends mature on their quest. (If we really wanted to up the "menace" factor, have Hera go into hiding and just be out there, waiting for a chance to strike while the group travels back to Greece.)

Though I did not like the majority of the choices made for this book, I did like some things about it. I liked Iole getting to have adult women role models to teach her about traditionally feminine things and that she was actually interested in learning them, even though it was hard for her. I also liked Alcie’s continued maturity and Homer feels like he’s finally settled into the group fully.

The way the duality of the Greek and Roman gods was handled wasn’t really historically accurate to my knowledge, but it was fun and a different take. It would have been nice to spend a bit more time with the gods so that we could see their differences emerge (they felt very same-y), but this did work. I enjoyed the scenes that were just the gods quite a bit. And Cloacina was great!

I also liked the chaos of the feast when they finally captured Greed. Hera and Juno’s plan wasn’t completely awful (though I don’t really buy that it would have worked as well as they thought it would) and I do have to acknowledge that it was smart for them to use Lucius Valerius like that.

As a final note, I'm glad we're out of main characters to pair up because if I have to read about one more 13 year old girl crushing on a boy too old for her and that crush being reciprocated I will actually have to stop reading this series.
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