A Beautiful Evil

There’s a lot I have to say about this book. First of all, I want to make it clear for myself that this book is only three stars for me. It won’t get any more, even though I wish I could rate it higher, because I love the cover, I love how big the book is, and I love the idea behind it. I had already written in one of my reading comments that I felt this book seemed more exciting to me because I only know the story or the myth of Pandora vaguely, not fully. I think that contributed to me wanting to keep reading. But honestly, if I had fully known the myth, I probably would have dropped this book halfway through, if not earlier. You can divide it into two halves. The first half is all about Pandora showing up at Matheous’ home, him being annoyed because he’s not supposed to accept gifts from the gods, yet he still does, and the two of them ending up in a grumpy rom-com situation. Then his two friends show up-apparently he doesn’t have friends, but they’re his friends-some sea nymphs or water creatures, and you can already tell it’s going into rom-com territory. The second half is about how they can stop the world’s drought and save humanity. And honestly, I feel like this book tried to do too much and didn’t succeed in any of the things it attempted. Maybe the relationship between Matheous and Pandora worked somewhat, although neither of them made much sense to me. It starts with Pandora being made out of clay, which is a nice concept, but everything in that scene-consent, her body, who gets to choose what -felt like too much. I have to agree with a previous reviewer: it was too much. For someone who was just created, Pandora has abstract thoughts that make no sense. She should be naive, a clean slate, yet she isn’t written that way at all. Another thing that bothered me is that the book never really explores the fact that Pandora was made specifically to love Matheous. He eventually tells her that he loves her because she’s imperfect and because he chooses her of his own free will. But she never has a moment of realization like, “Wait, the gods made me for him - do my feelings even belong to me?” That should have been a big emotional conflict, but it’s never explored. She only briefly pulls away, but the book doesn’t dive into the real issue, and that annoyed me. Honestly, a lot in this book annoyed me. I also didn’t understand why it mattered so much that Pandora is plus-sized. If anyone knows the reason, please tell me, because it didn’t seem to serve any real purpose. It kept being mentioned that she’s chubby and he’s skinny, and the repeated jokes and comparisons were unnecessary. Why make an iconic mythological figure plus-sized only to reduce it to a repetitive gag? Even if it was only a few times, it felt unnecessary. Then with Apollo, there’s a moment where jealousy suddenly pops up during a world-ending crisis, and it just felt ridiculous. Pandora herself frustrated me endlessly as a character. Honestly, none of the characters didn’t annoy me. I think the only one I liked was Athena, and even then, there should have been much more done with her. She helps create Pandora, wants her to be wise and driven by knowledge, but that thread is just dropped. At the end, she suddenly lashes out, telling Pandora she’s disappointed in her, but it’s not explored deeply. Pandora just realizes that the woman who helped create her actually manipulated her, and that’s it. There should have been more. Since Bea’s other books deal with mythological retellings, I feel like there could have been space to explore Athena more, but the book never goes there. And this is my main problem with books that aren’t sequels or prequels but still exist in the same universe. For example, when Persephone and Hades are mentioned-knowing that Bea wrote a book about them-I just found it unnecessary because I assume Athena was not further explored because there might be a possibility of a book specifically about her. Things like that annoy me a lot. Anyway: three stars. The ending felt rushed. I liked the part where they were with Prometheus, but after that, it weakened again. The writing style itself was beautiful, but Pandora annoyed me too much. I don’t regret buying it, especially since I used a gift card, and aesthetically it looks gorgeous next to another green book I own. But I’m disappointed. I’d still give Bea’s other books a chance, because I think the issue was specifically Pandora as a character. She was completely unlikeable to me. Maybe Persephone will be more my style, other reviews say so, but not right now. Retellings can be serious, emotional, romantic, and still convey true weight, like The Song of Achilles, which I love (except one random irrelevant scene where the male lead suddenly has a bisexual encounter). So yes: three stars. Not three and a half, not more. Just three, and that’s final.