Sweet Venom by Tera Lynn Childs

Sweet Venom (Sweet Venom #1)

By Tera Lynn Childs

Published by HarperCollins, 2011

384 pages (paperback)

Three teenage descendants of Medusa, the once-beautiful Gorgon maligned in myth, must reunite and embrace their fates.

Grace just moved to San Francisco and is excited to start over at a new school. The change is full of fresh possibilities, but it's also a tiny bit scary. It gets scarier when a minotaur walks in the door. And even more shocking when a girl who looks just like her shows up to fight the monster.

Gretchen is tired of monsters pulling her out into the wee hours, but what can she do? Sending the minotaur back to his bleak home is just another notch on her combat belt. She never expected to run into this girl who could be her double, though.

Greer has her life pretty well put together, thank you very much. But that all tilts sideways when two girls who look eerily like her appear on her doorstep and claim they're triplets, supernatural descendants of some hideous creature from Greek myth, destined to spend their lives hunting monsters. . . . (from barnesandnoble.com)

I recently got the second book in this series so I thought I would try out the first book. The cover looked dark and (possibly) depressing and boring so I didn’t think I would like this series.

I. Was. Wrong.

Not only is this book light-hearted, intense, captivating, and intelligent, it was something I could not put down. Really. I stayed up until 2am reading and then finished it the next day. The world Tera Lynn Childs created was believable and well-constructed. There was cliff-hanger after cliff-hanger plus a good dose of action (killing monsters!), romance, and sass. Fans of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books or Kiersten White’s Paranormalcy series will definitely love this set of books.

I am already super excited to start book #2 (Sweet Shadows). Luckily book #3 (Sweet Legacy) will be out in September so I won’t have to wait too long for my next Grace, Gretchen, and Greer fix!