jordinedg 's review for:

The Palace of Eros by Caro De Robertis

2.5

slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

---

Like many others who absolutely love Greek mythology retellings, I was pretty disappointed by The Palace of Eros. The concept interested me a ton - genderfluid Eros? Absolutely. But I just never found myself truly hooked while reading. I read the e-book on Libby and when my borrowing period was up I got back in line so I could finish it later on, but by the time it was my turn again, it had almost entirely slipped my mind. Overall, I was interested enough in the story to finish it, but I had a lot of issues with this book.

Writing
Prose can be a lot of fun, please don't get me wrong. But I truly think this book should've been half its actual length. I found myself skipping paragraphs because I just wasn't getting anything important from what I was reading. So much of this book is internal monologues,

which could be fine when the majority of the story surrounds 2 people who spend most of the time exclusively in each others' company, but nothing happened for far too long and

it felt like we were trying to hit a minimum word count.

Plot

Again - nothing happened for far too long. There was too much talk of waiting for something to happen, and when so much of the book is Psyche doing just that, I think it's okay to skip it more than we did

. My main gripe with the plot that did happen is that the ending felt rushed and unbelievable.

How exactly did we get our happy ending, Eros? Zeus is just fine with all of this? Psyche took a walk and now all is forgiven, make me immortal and let's forget my sisters who I pity so deeply?

Characters

For the most part, I could believe Psyche and Eros' actions. But I couldn't get a grip on what anybody else's motivations were, longterm

. Maybe I'm just too mortal to understand the temperaments of the gods but by choosing a single mythological love story to write 300 pages on, I need to believe the intentions of every character you choose to mention.