Carly Spade has quickly become one of my favorite romance authors. Especially because the more I read her Contemporary Mythos books, the more I realize that we really have the same kind of images of the Gods and what kind of people they would have been in modern times. A Dutch author had already paved the way for Ares, writing an amazing version of him in her novel, and I was therefore quite curious to meet Spade's version. Thank the Gods I managed to get an ARC!
What I love about this series is that each book really breathes the God being front and center. Which means that in this book we are confronted with passion, violence, fighting and most of all fire. Not only in Ares, but also in Harm. I have to admit that it's a setting quite strange for bookworm me, but the way Spade writes about the fights, about the training, about everything around the MMA worked for me. It's so focussed on the emotions and the adrenaline rush. It even seemed as if it all made me read faster.
On top of that I felt like this book had so many Greek Gods and Greek Mythology, maybe even more than the previous books. And literally everything Spade described and everyone we met made sense. I think it's quite hard not to fall a little bit in love with Dino and I loved that small glimpse of Poseidon! But, I most of all loved meeting Hephaestus and Athena! All those meetings, the struggles and the descriptions makes me long for endless more stories in this world!
And then there were the glimpses of the epic Greek wars, the Spartans, the Trojans! I want to talk on and on about those scenes, they were so vivid! I also really loved how the differences between Athena and Ares were explained and how this was translated to the different fighting styles of the Spartans and the Atheners. Even though it's a book about fighting and war, it's really explained with an amazing eye for details.
Of course, the true stars were our leading lady and her God of War. It felt like we didn't get to know Harm as intimately as the other girls, but in a way that also feels fitting. She's guarded, has trust issues and although she's a good fighter, she's also slightly hot headed. However, that does make her the perfect match for Ares. Ares has all this pent up anger and rage, constantly tempting him to forget the consequences. He needs an equal, a match and someone who understand him. It's a match made...well, just go and figure that answer out for yourself and read the book.