Review: The Goddess Test by Aimee Carter

The Goddess Test by Aimee Carter
Series: The Goddess Test, #1
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Publication Date: April 19, 2011
Buy: Amazon | The Book Depository

Goodreads Summary

Every girl who had taken the test has died.
Now it's Kate's turn.

It's always been just Kate and her mom - and her mother is dying. Her last wish? To move back to her childhood home. So Kate's going to start at a new school with no friends, no other family and the fear that her mother won't live past the fall.

Then she meets Henry. Dark. Tortured. And mesmerizing. He claims to be Hades, god of the Underworld - and if she accepts his bargain, he'll keep her mother alive while Kate tries to pass seven tests.

Kate is sure he's crazy - until she sees him bring a girl back from the dead. Now saving her mother seems crazily possible. If she succeeds, she'll become Henry's future bride and a goddess.

If she fails...

I finally picked this book up because I was in a "mythology mood" and I thought this might be the read for me. Based on reviews and such, I was fairly excited about starting The Goddess Test. But...turns out that it really wasn't for me.

Let's start with Kate, shall we? Kate was... she was suffering from one of the greatest (and most fiendish!) of all book personality disorders - The Bella Syndrome. She was so whiny and self centered and I just couldn't fall for her as a character. She was so off-putting! To make matters worse, I found her to be very immature. I like for characters to have some semblance of personality, which is why I didn't like Kate. Her personality was as flat as the page it was written on.

The romance between Henry & Kate was also flat. At first, I felt like it had a little bit of potential...but. Can you say "Stockholm syndrome"? Because that's what was going on here. Henry was so morose and quiet, so we never really got to know him as a character. He really wasn't in The Goddess Test very much at all.

A lot of things didn't add up. And when I say "didn't add up", I mean that they really didn't. Maybe it made a little bit of sense in the end, but the things that made sense were ridiculous, and they pointed towards a fate (and plot point) that should have been obvious to Kate from the beginning, because I was sure questioning it.

I know that I've already talked about Kate a little, but I feel like she's worth revisiting. In the beginning, I was all set to like her. At about two chapters in, though, I was ready to kill her. She meets not one... but two boys that are "interested" in her within the first ten minutes. At the beginning of the second chapter, she begins the dreaded "pretty" speech. (I wasn't conventionally pretty, etc.) Then, suddenly, she has a "friend". Quite truthfully, I saw no development on the part of friendship. It was awkward.

At least there was no love triangle, though. That was a plus. You know what was a minus, though? The plot. I predicted most everything that happened. I wanted to be surprised, but... it wasn't meant to be. All in all, The Goddess Test just wasn't for me.