Goddess Test #3
Aimee Carter
Paranormal Young Adult
Harlequin Teen
384 pages
Available February 26th
Received from publisher via NetGalley
THE STORY (from Goodreads)
Love or life.
Henry or their child.
The end of her family or the end of the world.
Kate must choose.
During nine months of captivity, Kate Winters has survived a jealous goddess, a vengeful Titan and a pregnancy she never asked for. Now the Queen of the Gods wants her unborn child, and Kate can't stop her--until Cronus offers a deal.
In exchange for her loyalty and devotion, the King of the Titans will spare humanity and let Kate keep her child. Yet even if Kate agrees, he'll destroy Henry, her mother and the rest of the council. And if she refuses, Cronus will tear the world apart until every last god and mortal is dead.
With the fate of everyone she loves resting on her shoulders, Kate must do the impossible: find a way to defeat the most powerful being in existence, even if it costs her everything.
Even if it costs her eternity.
MY THOUGHTS
As befitting the final installment of a trilogy, The Goddess Inheritance is action packed from beginning to end, building on the physical and emotional intensity of the previous two installments and bringing everything to a dramatic and tearful conclusion. We pick up nine months after the brutal cliffhanger of book two, our concern for Kate returning with shocking clarity as our minds play catch up, and our nerves remain exposed throughout – the battle between the council, Cronus and Calliope wreaking havoc on characters and readers alike.
Kate has been a challenging character from book one, her instinctual reaction to fall on her sword as the solution to any situation that demands payment in the form of violence or sacrifice one that has plagued us from the beginning, but it is particularly strong in this last book. Despite both James and Henry calling her on this tendency, Kate simply acknowledges their comments and then disregards them when a new opportunity to save others arises, and while we at first applaud a mother's need to do anything and everything to save her child, the repetition of Kate's actions seems to gradually distort the grand gesture from a noble one to something else entirely.
Initially we can't help but see Kate's willingness to do what Cronus asks of her in order to spare her child and Henry further pain as the selfless act it appears to be, but it doesn't take long before red flags begin to wave themselves madly in our field of vision–suspicions that are later confirmed by Kate herself–to make us question her motives. We come to realize her actions are both admirably selfless and extraordinarily selfish; the decision to lay down her life for those of her family not simply about wanting to protect them, but even more so about wanting to protect herself, the weight of loss a burden she prefers to hand off to someone else because she's not strong enough to bear it herself. That realization–that she'd rather leave Henry and her family to deal with the agony of her death, especially knowing what Henry's already suffered prior to their marriage, than simply be honest and communicate with them to try and find an answer to their problems that doesn't result in her martyrdom–darkens and twists our perception of her into something we can't quite move past no matter how much we wish to.
Despite the issues with Kate, The Goddess Inheritance is as captivating as its two predecessors, the emotional dramas of the inhabitants of Olympus painfully riveting, and Ms. Carter does a beautiful job of deftly tugging on our heartstrings each and every chapter. Though Kate and Henry's relationship still doesn't feel quite as genuine as we might like, the love between them still feeling somewhat fragile and delicate even after all they've been through, they present a more unified front in this final book to give us a little hope that their romance will achieve that solidity in the future even if we're not able to witness it for ourselves.
Rating: 3.5/5
