Originally posted on Just Geeking by.

Content warnings:
This book contains scenes of death, grief, blood, violence, ritual bloodletting, massacres, forced captivity, misogyny, wildfires, and mass animal deaths from wildfires.

There are flashbacks to an emotionally abusive relationship between a character and their father, child abandonment, bullying including physical abuse, homophobic and transphobic comments,

There are references to police harassing and attacking protesters, discussion of pollution, fuelling hate, worldwide pandemics and mass casualty events.

Please be aware that myths and stories from multiple pantheons are discussed throughout, and the content of these may be triggering.

Eighteen-year-old Leo Clarkson thought that the most difficult things he needed to worry about were dodging girls trying to give him their number, and trying to work out whether his friend David likes him too. That’s until the curator supervising his research internship suddenly disappears without a trace. He can’t imagine that this turn of fate will prove his research theories true but will bring him face-to-face with mythological beings long thought to just be stories.

Athena, the Greek goddess of war and wisdom, was tasked by the Council of Elders to investigate the mysterious disappearance of deities from multiple Pantheons. When her fate collides with Leo’s, the immortal goddess and human find themselves unlikely companions as Leo’s research into talismans becomes crucial to Athena completing her mission. It’s a mission that will take them all over the world as they find allies and avoid danger as their enemies try to stop them.

Rise of the Darkness has the potential to be a brilliant novel. It has an intriguing and engaging plot that unites all the pantheons in a quest against a dangerous foe. Gomez’s strength lies in her characters, and her ability to humanise immortal deities. Very often these characters are written as aloof and impersonal, having no emotions in common with humans despite stories about them being littered with examples of love, anger and jealousy.

Gomez does a great job of bringing the deities to life as people the reader can relate to, leading to some great scenes that delve deep into Athena’s personality and bring her to life on the page. The way that she writes Athena’s thoughts of her fellow Olympians feels very natural, and I liked the way that Gomez wove in the details of myths as if they were family history, which of course they are to Athena.

Gomez has a real talent for bringing the gods into modern times and pondering how they would react to it, and the results are great. There’s a fantastic scene between Leo and another Olympian on a plane that is just perfection. Gomez has created an adventure story with an epic quest, and with the god of wisdom and war as a main character you can bet the fight scenes are on point too.

Rise of the Darkness is a novel that has been written with a lot of passion and research, however, as I said what could be a great novel has been let down by some common mistakes. There is a lot of information introduced throughout the novel, which is to be expected considering one of the main characters is a research student and the other is the goddess of wisdom.

The problem is that this information is not dispersed throughout the story naturally, it occurs in large chunks, especially at the start of new chapters when the characters arrive at a new location. The syntax of these sentences also changes from past tense to present tense, reading like an encyclopedic entry. While the information is interesting, this is a fiction book, and I’m more interested in the characters’ thoughts about the location than statistics.

Despite the huge amount of research done, huge mistakes have been made regarding English school systems, which make Leo’s background quite unlikely. Leo is said to be eighteen years old, however, he has also not finished high school. Despite this, he is attending King’s College London, which Gomez refers to as a “prep school” where he helps teach classes.

Everything about this is incorrect. Let’s start with ‘high school’; from age 11 to 16 children in England attend compulsory secondary education, in public schooling this is called a secondary school. After the age of 16, they have the choice of attending college or sixth-form college to gain further qualifications. If they wish to attend University, they must do this, and they enter university at 18 years old.

King’s College London is a University, not a prep school, and accepts adult students from the age of 18 onwards (source). In UK universities the only students that teach classes, in my considerable experience, are PhD students. To start a PhD, students need to first complete an undergraduate degree (three to four years) and then a postgraduate degree (one to two years). That means that at eighteen, Leo is a first-year student who would need to have completed a lot more than just (secondary) school to even attend University, and there is no chance that he would be teaching (or helping out with) classes.

It seems an odd thing to overlook such important details for the background of one of your main characters. Unfortunately, this is a very common mistake that I come across when non-British authors choose the UK for the setting of their book.

Despite these problems, Gomez’s writing shines through, and she has written a compelling story that had me hooked from start to finish. I am definitely looking forward to the next book.

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