The Helm of Darkness

The Helm of Darkness

War on the Gods #1

A.P. Mobley

Sea of Ink Press, Jun 2018

Release June 3, 2018

260 pages, Kindle only

Adventure, mythology, young adult

Provided by Author

✭✭✭

The cover is stunning and will catch the eye of many readers. Rather than trying to depict something from the quest, the author chose to show the helm itself. Excellent choice!

The story is a quest written for young adults. The emotions while supposedly deep, actually come across as not being deeply felt. There is a hollowness to a lot of the emotional feeling in this book. The author is still young, and while the young are quite capable of feeling strong feelings and many have suffered great loss, I am guessing that the author has lead a rather average life without much close loss and so has not had any experience with great, deep feeling, yet. It is hard to write about that sort of emotion if you haven’t been close to it.

The characters are about half-and-half for reality. Zoey was very well-done. She had made her mistakes when she was young and wanted to be able to put them behind her. Now she’s died and has been brought back by the prophecy. So her past is truly behind her. She can be whatever she wants or is able to be. She sees this as an opportunity to really live a worthy life and do some good. The godlings aren’t well developed, I didn’t think. Obviously, they have some issues and there is some backstory that would help to understand them better, but the author chose not to share any of that with us. The gods themselves acted more like children fighting over toys than all-powerful beings fighting over a world.

The pace was good. It kept things going with no dragging or lost time. It wasn’t a breakneck speed, but it was pretty brisk with things happening that kept everyone on their toes and kept the quest moving forward towards its goal of the Helm of Darkness, the property of Hades, Lord of the Underworld.

The tension suffers a bit from some wobbles in the story and from some of the weaker characters.

The story seemed hollow and I kept putting it down and didn’t want to read it. It didn’t draw me or engage me. I’m not sure if I will be reading the next one when they go after Triton’s trident.