Monday 22 July 2013

Books I Did Not Finish! - 22/07/2013

Hello everyone I can't exactly say happy Monday can I? Mondays are rarely something to be happy about. How was your weekend?

Welcome back to another edition of Books I Did Not Finish. Today's instalment features a series.

Starcrossed 
by 
Josephine Angelini

Tagline: Destiny Brought Them Together The Gods Will Keep Them Apart

I'm not sure if I ever told you that I hate History. Yes I can't stand it, it bores me to tears, all except for two Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. When those topics were discussed in history class you can bet your bottom dollar I was paying attention when normally I would be trying to not fall asleep. So this is a retelling/ re-imagining of the Iliad, it's an angst ridden forbidden romance with and Ancient Greek twist, I wanted to read it the first moment I saw it. 





I'm sure I've mentioned before how much I loved this books if not well there I just said it. I freaking loved this book. Obviously it's not for everyone but it had ancient Greek, romance, and angst 3 big huge ticks for me. I loved Helen and Lucas. Well really I just loved Lucas but there you go. That is until I got to the end of the book. Then the sequels came and everything turned sour. The book I loved became part of a series I wanted nothing to do with.

Why?

Well the reason is the one thing I know I have never hidden from you. The Love Triangle. But I'll get on to that in a minute. 

The first step along the road to the demise of my love for this book came when the Author decided to make everyone think that Helen and Lucas were cousins (I'm sure I've seen this before. Wait I have hi Mortal Instruments.) Yep they are cousins, oh wait no the reader can know that they aren't actually cousins but I'll kill off the only character who would tell them that they aren't. To me it felt like the author laughing my face like yeah I'll just carry on with this until it suites me to say all of sudden "wait you aren't cousins after all" yep I didn't like that one bit. Also Helen was a little Bella Swan esque but obviously that was to try and draw in the Twilight readership. 

Okay I'm getting a little carried away let's have a look at the blurb.

"When shy, awkward Helen Hamilton meets Lucas Delos for the first time, she thinks two things: the first, that he is the most ridiculously beautiful boy she has ever seen in her life: (SIDENOTE: Aren't they always in this type of book??) the second, that she wants to kill him with her bare hands.

An ancient curse means Lucas and Helen are destined to loathe one another. But sometimes love is stronger than hate, and not even the gods themselves can prevent what will happen next . . ."

Okay so the blurb sucked me in (don't judge me I was around 15 when this book came out it's perfectly acceptable for me to fall for that!) then I saw this video trailer that was released for the book. 


And like the sucker I was I knew that I just had to read this book, and when I first finished it I was swooning all over the place going on and on about how it was my favourite book and how a year was just too damn long to wait for the next one. Cursing the author begging for it to be released sooner.

What happened next?

I never read it. I've never even laid a finger on a copy of the sequel and I never will. Starcrossed was followed by two books, Dreamless and Goddess. As of this year both of those sequels have now been released. An I know in my heart I will never read them.

To me the love triangle is a plot device that is used mainly by authors who have signed a three book deal but don't actually have enough material to fill out three books, so they stick a love triangle in there to fill out the pages and more often than not people will buy in to it and people will read it. Yet I am one of those people that the minute I heard Helen would have another love interest in the sequel I wanted to cry.

I know that's completely overly dramatic but I was really upset and felt somewhat short-changed by the author, to me it was almost as bad as when an author says their series will be a trilogy but the decides it's going to be more the reason the cite is that there was still so much more of their story that need to be shared, the reality it's making them a tonne of money and they don't want it to stop. (I'm mainly looking at the publishers here)

If you enjoyed the sequel fair enough you are entitled to your opinion as much as I am entitled to mine. But the love triangle made no sense in this series and it never will. Yes I know that they thought they were cousins but still it undermined everything either one of them (Lucas ad Helen) had ever said in the first book. About how they would never want anyone else, even though they knew it was impossible for them to be together they were so in love it almost killed them to be apart, and yet here Helen is getting all googly-eyed over another guy so soon. 

Not to mention the Greek mythology in this book is incredibly thin.

Needless to say I have a series issue with Love Triangles, but I have a whole post devoted to that which you can read here. I mean I dislike it so much that it's stopping me from even picking up the first book in a very popular NA series called Thoughtless by S C Stephens, but that's not just a love triangle it's got cheating in it too so that's a whole other ball park I'm not comfortable getting in to. 

Did you read this book? Did you finish the series? What did you think? Let me know in the comments below, I'm not going to ask you to try and convince me to finish this series because it's not going to happen. 



That's all for today I hope you enjoyed this post and I shall see you all on Wednesday!

Don't forget to comment below and tell me your opinion on this book! I would love to hear from you!

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