If Percy Jackson was in The Hunger Games? - Lore by Alexandra Bracken Review

Ten months later I have FINALLY read Lore by Alexandra Bracken. I’m going to have to give you some context on that countdown: back on a weirdly hot day in November my best friend Georgia and I (you know the best friend I mention in practically every post, apparently, I can’t think for myself) were in town trying to get me a job. Fail by the way. While we were there, we thought it would be a great idea to hop on a TikTok trend we’d seen where two people would buy a book, swap it, read it and annotate it and swap back. So we two people bought a book. We swapped it. I ended up with Serpent and Dove by Shelby Mahurin, a very slow read, which I read and annotated. And she had Lore, which she read… and didn’t annotate. Now you may be thinking what a terrible friend, not completing her part of the activity, but after I’d annotated Serpent and Dove and found it to be the most tedious task, I decided reading around post it notes would be way worse. Especially when my biggest pet peeve is writing in books so that ruled out actual annotations like one would Macbeth in year 10. Anyway, I got it back, I read it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Lore was marketed to me as a dystopia that’s main source of inspiration was The Hunger Games but played and twisted in the Greek heroes and legends. Everything I love. It follows seventeen (?) year old Melora Perseous as she enters her second experience with the Agon, a hunt between the descendants of the Greek heroes, Lore being the last living descendant of Perseus, as they search for the Gods turned mortal for a week to kill and take their powers. Her life changes when an injured Athena shows up at her doorstep after her being convinced she had escaped that life forever.

The story is gripping to say the least, riddled with betrayals and deaths, and deaths that weren’t really deaths and almost deaths and characters you’re convinced will betray but turn out to just be a complete cutie trapped inside a grumpy asshole’s body. It took me a long time to read, but not because it was boring at all, I’ve just had major book burnout since I got back from holiday. But once you’re actually in the book and not thinking about watching New Girl, there’s enough cliffhangers and little bits you can’t quite understand in full throughout the book that could easily pull you in and make you finish the entire thing in one sitting if you can sit still and pay attention for that long. There’s an underlying plot about her family’s murder and her childhood with her friend and the love interest Castor Achilleos that adds a nice little bit of sympathy and drama to a book that is overall very action packed and a lot of the use of character relationships is used for comedy or to subvert the idea of Lore being alone despite everyone she used to love was dead.

It also plays well with the Greek Gods, Zeus is at the centre of it all but is never a character we meet face to face, he’s just a looming cruel presence which is exactly what you’d expect from the God of the sky. But we do meet a lot of other Olympians and different versions of them for that matter. Growing up obsessed with Percy Jackson, it is odd to see these different twists on the Gods and their powers that aren’t so family friendly and have much more meaning than simply to be used as a minor plot device to send Percy and his friends on their way. I have found Percy Jackson does fuck with you a bit as you read this, because being so used to associating Perseus with Poseidon rather than Zeus it does take a while to actually realise that these characters don’t have any correlation with the Gods at all, Lore does not have water powers, none of the mortal characters have powers at all. Once I stopped treating it like it linked to the Riordan books there was less frustration.

One thing Bracken did incredibly was making characters not only extremely likeable but all had relatively detailed backstories that added to the group dynamic well. Even Athena, who on the surface had not a lot to her but being a watchful observer over the others with mostly dialogue that consisted of complaints, was still engaging and added the final layer to our main group that made the story and the twists all the more shocking. My favourite character was a tie between Miles and Castor, while Miles was such a bubbly presence that was a breath of fresh air in the doom and gloom of the hunt, and Castor was such an adorable love interest who was so interesting as a character and loved Lore in such an innocent way that sometimes I miss in the steam of fantasy books and romance. The main villain was a bit bland though, a classic case of all talk. They set Wrath up as this evil mastermind who had inherited Ares's obsession for danger and bloodshed, and while yes he killed and he tortured, he was a bit bland. But I suppose it's hard to make a villain great when the ultimate aim is to overshadow them with an even bigger bad. Loki is the only fictional character who did that well.

I’ve always been a very visual reader. Sometimes I read books that have adaptations and I start to confuse what was in the book and what was actually in the film because I can visualise scenes so vividly, I convince myself it must have been translated onto screen but I’d forgotten. Lore was one that you could definitely see. The dinge of dystopian New York, the fighting styles, the hunters and their creepy masks and Lore’s little sisters with their eyes ripped out of their heads. But I found it hard to visualise the characters how they were described. I’d love to tell you what they looked like in comparison to how I imagined them but I can’t remember the specifics so just trust me when I tell you Lore’s hair isn’t white blonde and Miles doesn’t look like Reggie from Julie and the Phantoms.

While I think there’s an element of disconnect when it takes you so long to read a book, Lore is still one that will keep you on your toes when you barely remember what happened ten pages before. It was an overall intense dystopian novel with an adorable sprinkling of romance and an ending that feels anticlimactic at first until you realise that you wouldn’t really want it any other way. Not even if Lore has now potentially fucked over Castor’s future. I’m not salty, you are.