I finally made it to the end of the Legacy of Gods series. I am relieved and already looking for my next fantasy/romance novel to get obsessed over. I am already thinking about what I am going to read next because even though this series was decent, I only truly loved one out of the six books. The other five featured my least favorite trope, and reading the same story, albeit with minor changes to the story line, five times in a row, was exhausting and tiresome.
Ava has been a background character for five novels running, but we finally get to learn what her story and tragedy is. She has serious mental health issues, a form of psychosis, of which started to affect her around puberty. She inherited her diagnosis from her grandmother, so her parents recognized what was happening to her when it started, and she has been in therapy and medicated since. However, Ava has never been the most diligent when it comes to taking her medication, and paired with her love of drinking and taking recreational drugs, her treatment plan isn’t always as effective as it should be. She drinks, takes drugs, and parties to excess not only to escape her psychosis, but because of heartbreak. When Ava was seventeen she confessed to longtime family friend Eli, cousin of her roommate Glyndon, that she was in love with him and had been for a long time. He rejected her, brutally, and since then she has been doing everything she can to prove to him that she doesn’t love him anymore, hates him in fact, while simultaneously ruining any chance he has at a relationship with any other woman.
Ava gets far too out of control one night, she gets in her car after leaving a club incredibly inebriated, gets into an accident, and the next time we see her she is waking up in a hospital. She assumes she has spent a few days in a coma, but it has actually been months. And there is another twist to go along with that one.
This book I did actually get very much into, as I enjoy reading about psychology and psychoactive drugs as a hobby. It was fun for me to try to figure out what exactly was going on at the same time that Ava was, trying to piece together what had happened in her life during the lapses in her memory. Everyone around her knows the truth about what happened between the accident and when she wakes up, some more than others, but no one wants to tell her for fear of upsetting or angering her. Everyone thinks it’s best if she never remembers the truth, or if the memories return on their own. It was part mystery, part thriller, part dark romance, which is a very alluring combination.
If you don’t mind the virgin trope, this is a top tier series for you to get into. You’ll get five novels absolutely focused on it. If you can’t stand it, I would not recommend it, you’ll be groaning about it the entire time like I was. God of Fury is still and will always be my favorite novel in this series, it had the right balance. For fun, and because I wanted to see if everything was cohesive, I created a timeline of the major events that occur over the course of the six novels. Each book is stated as being a standalone, but you hear and read about the same characters in each book and the first five novels all happen within months of each other. It may not be entirely correct, but I did my best based on periods of time mentioned by the main characters, content clues, and comparing the narratives between books. Take a peek if this interests you, I have the pdf at the end of this post, and I hope you enjoy it.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 