Divine by Mistake: Flunked the Finish-able Book Test

Divine by Mistake by P.C. Cast

I was not able to finish Divine by Mistake. It flunked the Finish-able Book Test, which means that if I put it down for a couple of days and find no desire to pick it back up, I don’t bother wasting my time.

Shannon, a schoolteacher from Oklahoma, gets zapped by magic into the mythical world of Partholon, where she ends up worshipped as a priestess, married to an attractive shapeshifter, and embroiled in a war with the truly nasty and evil Fomorians. I liked the premise. Unfortunately, the cover blurb was more interesting than the actual novel.

First of all, the mythology is sloppy as heck. I tried to get over this, accept that the book is a comedy loosely based on mythology, but it still bugged me that Cast can’t keep her folklore straight. Priestesses of Epona are mixed with Greek-style nymphs and centaurs. The result is that the book ends up feeling shallow rather than deep, fluffy rather than rooted in an ancient mythology. I wouldn’t have minded if she had made up her own mythology. It was the myth-in-a-blender that gave me a headache.

And speaking of shallow, the heroine seems unable to endure a single page of text without brooding about her weight or her hair. I can understand doing a little bit of this — it makes her seem more real at first. However, you’d think that after a few days in the mythical world, she would have figured out there are bigger concerns than whether her thighs are fat. I’ve already seen Bridget Jones.

I guess this book isn’t bad, per se — it just didn’t interest me all that much.