Yeh nah.

I am not into bondage; I don’t especially like reading about it. I understand that other people do, and that’s cool; I really don’t care. Whether I will keep reading a book that has bondage stuff in it depends on whether the plot and the characters warrant it, and how uncomfortable those scenes make me.

Enough of a prelude?

This started out well enough. Five apparent orphans in a boarding school where they are the only students; odd goings-on, and at least one student convinced that they’re not actually on Earth (why? who knows). The student interactions were usually entertaining enough and the discomfort level wasn’t too high, for the first half or so. I was quite looking forward to finding out what odd thing was going on and whether the kids would have powers.

Then the governors etc of the school turned up and it was Lady Cyprian (although I was confused by her because I really thought they were saying her husband was the Unseen One, thus Hades, so I thought she was Persephone even though her attitude and name didn’t fit… nope, turns out I misunderstood and her husband was indeed Hephaestus). Some of the ways these characters were referred to was confusing, but then alternately transparent, so I got a bit impatient with the ‘are you trying to disguise their Greek god-ness or not’ – and then there were references to their Roman names but also that they were Greek gods – and I started to get doubtful.

Then the two girls dress up as very provocative maids in order to distract a cranky gardener called Grendel… which I can maybe come at because in theory they’re 16 but in reality there’s something weird about their ages… but THEN the three boys ‘vote’ on making them stay in those outfits, and the girls don’t get to ignore them.

So: yeh nah. I have no idea where I got this from; it’s been sitting on my iPad for ages, and I’ve never got around to reading it. Now I don’t have to finish it or worry about the sequels.