Book Review: Sweet Venom by Tara Lynn Childs

Gretchen, Grace, and Greer are triplets, separated at birth, and descendents of Medusa.  Gretchen is a huntress, fighting monsters who escape from their supernatural prison.  Grace just moved to San Fransisco and discovers Gretchen quite by accident.  Sucked into the monster-fighting world, Grace discovers that they have a third sister, who is less than thrilled to learn that she's adopted and has such a heritage.  When Grace discovers a prophecy that suggests that the three of them are even more special than previously thought, the three must cooperate to learn about their powers, heritage, and destiny.

Interestingly, I don't have a lot to say about this book.  I liked it; it's got an interesting premise, good execution of that premise, and three main characters who manage to be wildly different yet clearly similar.  Each chapter is told in first-person from the POV of one of the sisters, and their differences in worldview and priorities kept me from having to double-check the chapter header to remind myself which sister was talking.

The ending kind of snuck up on me; there's not a sense of winding towards an ending of this installment, like you get in a lot of series works.  Rather, this makes a mad dash to the end of the book and yells at you to follow into the next one (which isn't available yet--of course) at the same headlong pace as the rest of the book.  It gives a sense of being one story broken into chunks rather than three separate stories which happen to have an overarching unity.  Yet the end wasn't unsatisfying; quite the opposite.  It set up the next book without quite being a cliffhanger or reaching any conclusion, which is quite a feat.

While not as OMGBBQPONIES as some of the other YA I've read recently, this is a solid, well-written effort and I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

4/5 stars (a note on my rating system)