A review by kori_krc
A Touch of Darkness by Scarlett St. Clair

2.0

I wanted to like this so badly, but I just spent the whole time screaming to my friend that things didn't make sense or that I hated it here. Persephone was single handedly the most annoying and frustrating MC to have to follow. She was willingly naive, constantly played the victim, and just had no personality other than "poor me". She spent the entire first 300 pages willingly ignoring literally every single thing anyone would say about Hades unless it was negative, and if it was positive, she would ignore it to fit her narrative of what she expected him to be. She constantly jumped to conclusions about Hades' character and then never wanted to hear anyone out about how she was wrong. She even went as far to write a scathing article about how awful he was, even after finding out he wasn't as bad as she thought just so she could reassure herself that she was right. She constantly made herself the victim by refusing to stand up to her mother, even though she's a full ass adult, and also putting herself in situations she previously knew and seemingly understood the consequences of and then complained about those consequences once they came about and blamed literally everyone else but herself. It was also weird to have Persephone spend pages and pages talking about how much she hated Hades and how awful he was and then to turn around, in the same breath, literally jump into his arms and start in on hate foreplay? So many odd choices were made when it came to Persephone as a character and her motivations that when she did a complete 180 in the last 50 pages and randomly became this bad ass woman who takes no shit it was jarring and felt off. On top of that, having a sequel to this book feels like a cash grab or like St. Clair got a book deal for however many books and really only had one book to publish so she quick came up with another storyline because this book tied things up nice enough that a sequel isn't necessary. Am I going to force myself through the next 2 books? Yes. Why? Because I already spent my money on them thinking it was a trilogy only come to find that there's now a 4th book coming and depending on how the next 2 go, I most likely will not be picking it up.