ARC Review: A Veil of Gods and Kings by Nicole Bailey
A NA Greek myth retelling, with a HFN ending as this is the first book in a series. It’s worth noting that this is pretty low steam - it tends towards vagueness or fade to black for most of the physical parts outside of kissing.
While I found the writing itself to be decent, I have some larger criticisms, though I think it has potential.
Romance
This promises an enemies-to-lovers, high emotion book. I personally found the romance to be lacking on several fronts. First, it’s barely enemies to lovers. Mild dislike predicated on assumptions to lust to love. They don’t meet for a while in the beginning, and barely start interacting until halfway through.
I would not classify it as a slow burn either - there’s no burn. As a book labeled as a romance, I’d expect at least interaction between the characters for more of the book.
Characters
Hyacinth: The prince is painted as a stick in the mud, rule bound, no fun person. As far as what is shown to the reader, he’s just being responsible, trying to run a kingdom while his father is out.
He does have a consistent personality based around this, which makes for a solid characterization. I also appreciated that he is a competent prince - taking his responsibility seriously, and trying to improve his kingdom and caring about his people.
Apollo: Apollo comes off as a childish brat for a very long time. He is judgmental of Hyacinth for weak reasons, and never really walks those opinions back in a satisfactory manner. It ends up with him coming off as self-centered, to the point of unable to care about people on a large scale, versus his favorite pastime of giving nuts to individual poor people.
While this can make a solid character personality - and does - I don’t think he ever managed a redemption arc or personal growth, which made him less appealing.
Everyone else: There are a fair amount of secondary characters to keep track of. Notably, we have the sister of Hyacinth, Epiphany - I’ll get to her having her own, frequent POV chapters next. Epiphany seems to be mainly a vehicle for discussing the plight of women in this world, and her romantic arc fell flat for me.
We spent a lot of time with Temi, and though I liked her a lot, it still didn’t work for me as far as book cohesion. Temi voiced a lot of my own opinions though, especially at chiding Apollo for being an unreasonable brat, which was satisfying.
The king, when he returned at the very end, is probably one of the better characters. It was nice having a reasonable, loving father figure present. Especially in contrast to Evil Zeus.
The sister’s POV:
This, I did not like. There are a lot of chapters in Epiphany’s POV. Why? Why are we reading her entire sort-of-romance and interactions separately? It takes away from the main storyline without contributing much. Her struggles with her lot in life could have been communicated through interactions with Hyacinth in his POV. This would keep the book feeling more focused, rather than jumpy. I ended up skimming these chapters fairly heavily.
General other thoughts
I felt that the pacing in general was a bit inconsistent. The beginning had much longer chapters and slower build, and by the end it felt like we were racing along with each chapter barely a conversation. The content of these later chapters didn’t match the sense of urgency created by these rapid switches in POV either, so it was not effective if the intent was to use it that way.
The politics stuff - this was very very heavy in the beginning, and felt wildly out of place. It’s trying to take on the plight of the poor, feminism, rich vs. poor attitudes, etc. It’s a lot, especially given how there’s other things that would be a better fit for the story. Despite all the focus on this in the beginning, it gets unceremoniously dropped once the lust kicks in.
Overall, I think this would have been more successful if it had adhered more strongly to the theme of fighting your fate. This did pop up occasionally, but if it had been a stronger thread, it could have brought all the plot, romance, characters together much better. A focus on fate would be a better match for the gods vibe as well. The big, overarching plot barely began at the very end, so perhaps the sequel will have more intrigue and plot action.
Ellie's review: 2.5 stars
I will preface this by saying, even with the harsh rating, this book wasn’t badly written at all. The original concept is interesting, and the writing style was fine. There were some scenes I liked, and moments where I could definitely see potential. Sadly, the execution of both the plot and the romance was lacking and by the end of the book I was a little bored.
So this is a story about the god Apollo and the mortal prince Hyacinth. It’s not really a retelling, because it doesn’t follow the original myth, but borrows the characters. In this, Apollo hasn’t “ascended” yet, which means he still lives on Earth with the mortals and doesn’t have access to his full divine powers. He doesn’t want to join his father, Zeus, and be a pawn in the games he plays with no regard to mortals’ lives. As a lesson, Zeus sends Apollo to live with Hyacinth for a year. This is marketed as an enemies-to-lovers romance, but rapidly, this premise runs thin. There’s no reason for those two to hate each other. Basically, Apollo despises Hyacinth because, at an event organized to praise the Gods 5 years prior, Hyacinth was polite and tried to please Zeus? As he should, as a mortal Prince whose kingdom is at the mercy of Zeus will. In the end, Apollo just seemed petty and rude in regards to his initial dislike of Hyacinth. I didn’t buy the enemies-to-lovers dynamics at all, which probably didn’t help me appreciate the romance. Hyacinth was a better character, in my opinion : well-rounded and actually competent at his job, which I appreciated. I thought he was a solid and likeable character. There were a few secondary characters I also quite liked, like Temi, who was great. Ares, Apollo's brother and the God of war, was a fun interpretation of the classical figure and makes a good impression even though he only makes a few appearances.
The other problem I had with Apollo is his simplistic views of how poverty and society in general work. He spends the first part of the book complaining about how Hyacinth is doing political tasks and doesn’t truly understand poor people, not like he does (because he goes around under disguise and offers food to poor children in the village?). At first, I thought this might be by design and would act as a starting point for character growth for Apollo, but Apollo’s Disney-like political views ended up reflecting the overall heavy-handed way this novel approached a lot of social issues. I don’t normally expect my romance books to be a valid criticism of privilege and wealth inequality, but this was a really big focus of the first part of the novel and the main initial conflict between the two MCs.
Notice how I said “first part of the book” and “initial conflict”? Yeah, there were some pacing issues and all those politics issues are forgotten at some point and only brought up in the last 10% where EVERYTHING gets solved really quickly. The romance also has pacing issues. It doesn’t really start until 50% and even then I just didn’t feel romantic tension. There were still some good moments between the MCs, but since there was minimal prior build-up, it didn’t totally work for me. Maybe it would have helped if 25% of the book wasn’t in Hyacinth sister’s POV, who is having her own lackluster romance… Yeah.
I will preface this by saying, even with the harsh rating, this book wasn’t badly written at all. The original concept is interesting, and the writing style was fine. There were some scenes I liked, and moments where I could definitely see potential. Sadly, the execution of both the plot and the romance was lacking and by the end of the book I was a little bored.
So this is a story about the god Apollo and the mortal prince Hyacinth. It’s not really a retelling, because it doesn’t follow the original myth, but borrows the characters. In this, Apollo hasn’t “ascended” yet, which means he still lives on Earth with the mortals and doesn’t have access to his full divine powers. He doesn’t want to join his father, Zeus, and be a pawn in the games he plays with no regard to mortals’ lives. As a lesson, Zeus sends Apollo to live with Hyacinth for a year. This is marketed as an enemies-to-lovers romance, but rapidly, this premise runs thin. There’s no reason for those two to hate each other. Basically, Apollo despises Hyacinth because, at an event organized to praise the Gods 5 years prior, Hyacinth was polite and tried to please Zeus? As he should, as a mortal Prince whose kingdom is at the mercy of Zeus will. In the end, Apollo just seemed petty and rude in regards to his initial dislike of Hyacinth. I didn’t buy the enemies-to-lovers dynamics at all, which probably didn’t help me appreciate the romance. Hyacinth was a better character, in my opinion : well-rounded and actually competent at his job, which I appreciated. I thought he was a solid and likeable character. There were a few secondary characters I also quite liked, like Temi, who was great. Ares, Apollo's brother and the God of war, was a fun interpretation of the classical figure and makes a good impression even though he only makes a few appearances.
The other problem I had with Apollo is his simplistic views of how poverty and society in general work. He spends the first part of the book complaining about how Hyacinth is doing political tasks and doesn’t truly understand poor people, not like he does (because he goes around under disguise and offers food to poor children in the village?). At first, I thought this might be by design and would act as a starting point for character growth for Apollo, but Apollo’s Disney-like political views ended up reflecting the overall heavy-handed way this novel approached a lot of social issues. I don’t normally expect my romance books to be a valid criticism of privilege and wealth inequality, but this was a really big focus of the first part of the novel and the main initial conflict between the two MCs.
Notice how I said “first part of the book” and “initial conflict”? Yeah, there were some pacing issues and all those politics issues are forgotten at some point and only brought up in the last 10% where EVERYTHING gets solved really quickly. The romance also has pacing issues. It doesn’t really start until 50% and even then I just didn’t feel romantic tension. There were still some good moments between the MCs, but since there was minimal prior build-up, it didn’t totally work for me. Maybe it would have helped if 25% of the book wasn’t in Hyacinth sister’s POV, who is having her own lackluster romance… Yeah.
We received a free copy (ARC) on Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
A Veil of Gods and Kings on Amazon
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