A review by clovetra
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

adventurous challenging medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

idk how to feel about this book. honestly i think im becoming a bit… disillusioned with greek mythology retellings at the moment. i honestly think they swing big and either really succeed or meander. and i would say this book follows the later.
i really couldn’t connect with this book at all. the ending felt rushed, and after the minotaur story was completed, the story felt as if it was floundering. obviously the entire book can’t be about life at crete but the fact it barely even covered 100 pages really let this book down. 
ariadne was at best a blank slate to narrate the tales of dionysus, and at worst was incredibly boring and annoying. i understand her naivety is fundamental to her story but it was overdone 200 pages in, and by the end i was over her.
phaedra was kind of likeable i guess. i enjoyed her at the beginning, but as soon as her story moved to her & hippolyta, she became insufferable. seriously when
her & ariadne were fighting over hippolyta
i didn’t agree with either of them. her ending also felt rushed and she lacked any depth being her impulsivity and brash nature.
dionysus was boring as well. he seemed to be all over the place with his characterisation, and his ending felt like it against everything earlier set up in the book. i get that was kind of the point but from a reader’s perspective it’s just a tad stupid.
i also think i became disillusioned with saint’s writing style by the end. to begin with i loved her descriptions and her poetic way of writing, but after the 20th sentence telling us that women always pay the price for a man’s crime i was over it. this book felt like it was going in circles constantly.
now you might ask - why did i finish this? because i own a copy of this, and i was curious to see if it could redeem itself the more it progressed. i don’t like to DNF books i own - if its a library or ebook sure she’s going in the DNF pile. but i paid $26 for this i was finishing it either way. and yet why didn’t i give this a 1-star? because i was still curious to see where this went. i wasn’t invested in the characters but i was invested in where things would go. 
idk i don’t think i had too much fun reading this. the beginning was intriguing, but after ariadne’s arrival at noxus the book fizzled away. and also the ending was dumb, anticlimatic and yet again rushed.
i will defo be taking a break from retellings for a while after this one!
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