Book Review: A Veil of Gods and Kings - Nicole Bailey
This book felt like the author saw the names Apollo and Hyacinth and decided that was enough. Most things that clearly are associated Apollo especially regarding his mythological origins are completely changed or nonexistent- I would be able to tolerate and accept Apollo having a mortal mother instead of Leto or even that he was born as a demigod and had to ascend later (as some myths do classify this as a requirement for gods), but to completely change the fact that Artemis is his twin sister and instead turn her into his mortal half sister was completely unfounded. Again: taking the name without any regard for attempting to stay somewhat loyal to the source.
While the book wanted to tell you that this was set in Ancient Greece, everything that the book showed clearly evidenced to the contrary. I should have expected this from the author’s note at the beginning saying that there were “liberties” taken with historical accuracy, but there is a large difference between adding saddles for horses and the blatant disregard for what technologies and architecture the ancient Greeks actually had- such as, at one point, the characters going to an indoor theater complete with a hanging glass chandelier.
This book is advertised as a slow burn- which is accurate, as the only characters that had chemistry aren’t even the ones who ended up together. The relationship between Apollo and Hyacinth is dull and lifeless- there was an attempt to brand this as an “enemies to lovers” but there was nothing of substance beyond “This guy is annoying and I don’t want to spend time with him- oh wait, now I do.” In addition, the set up for the story doesn’t make sense unless you harbor a rather obscene amount of suspension of disbelief or jump through hoops yourself attempting to justify it because the story certainly doesn’t.
Epiphany was a character that was simultaneously somewhat interesting and also annoying. There’s an attempt in the story at having a commentary about the societal role of women- which it fails to do because the only one that’s enforcing the standards of a woman’s role in ancient Greece is Epiphany herself, as it’s told multiple times to her that she doesn’t have to go through with her presentation to meet eligible marriage candidates if she doesn’t want to, and that she doesn’t even need to get married if she doesn’t want to, but SHE is the one who keeps saying, “No, this is my role, woe is me.”
All of this doesn’t even mention the lack of quality of just the line to line writing. I’ll give the book credit where it’s due: there are some very good descriptions especially when it comes to scenery. However, everything else is juvenile and repetitive at best. The book is absolutely rife with repetitive cliche mannerisms like rolling eyes, smirking, “sucked in a breath”/“blew out a breath”, “bobbed their head”, and chuckling- oh god, the chuckling. Everyone is chuckling. Always. Forever.
There was some attempt slightly made with some of the curses: Hera’s plight, Hades’ realm- but these were few and far between and littered with an absurd amount of modern language and lazy curses such as “shit” and “badass”- with “what the hell” being perhaps the most egregious as the Greeks didn’t have a concept of hell and only referred to the Underworld as such or Hades.
TL;DR: This book is basically a modern au of characters that share the same names as the Greek Apollo and Hyacinth that tries to tell you it’s set in Ancient Greece.
The only reason I finished this book in the first place was because it was short and I didn’t want to find another audiobook in the meantime. I would have dnfed an hour in (approximately 10%).
Also, I cannot for the life of me fathom why, if desiring to overthrow Zeus and the Greek pantheon, the author would choose the Roman pantheon, which is the Greek one but objectively worse.
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