Challenges of the Gods Review

After Mike goes through a gut-wrenching betrayal by his fiancée, he finds himself in what he thinks might be the afterlife. But this is no heaven. The gods made a mistake and created another Earth in a parallel universe, putting both universes in peril. They need someone from his planet to destroy the alternate, and Mike is randomly selected for the job.

Trapped in an impossible choice, Mike accepts his mission and is returned to an Earth—and a body—so unlike his own. There, he meets Jane, who is—unbeknownst to him—the secret leader of an organization bent on tracking down Earth’s saboteur. In the face of her passion for humanity, Mike’s resolve falters. If Mike won’t complete his mission, the gods will.

Post Includes Amazon Affiliate Link

At the start of the book, Mike is approached by the gods or the messengers. Mike is sent on a mission to kill everyone on an alternate universe of Earth. He wakes up in the body of another man who is almost like him, but on a world that isn’t his own. He doesn’t understand the social cues of this world, his friend thinks that he is crazy because of his paranoia, but no one understands. He doesn’t want to kill everyone, but the messengers say that he has to in order to save his world. Is murdering an entire population worth it to save his planet?

I started this book thinking it was going to be a story about the “evil” Greek gods, but it really wasn’t. By the time the book was halfway through, the gods had turned into general alien “messengers.” Also, they didn’t really do that much! Mike was placed on Earth with a secret mission to kill everyone. How is he supposed to kill everyone when he is only one man? I don’t know. Honestly, it doesn’t really make sense. You can’t expect one human man, whether he is from the future or not, to be able to destroy an entire population. It just isn’t going to happen. Then, the synopsis says that the gods are going to do the job themselves. I never really saw the gods intervene anywhere else in the story? Maybe they did at the end, but I was so lost that by that point I didn’t really know what was going on.

I have to say, I didn’t really like Mike. He didn’t choose to be a secret agent, but when he got to the new Earth, he didn’t even try to be conspicuous. He would assume things and act first before reading the situation. Sometimes I wonder why he was discharged from the hospital when he clearly wasn’t acting right in the head. Especially given that his daughter had died recently, and now he doesn’t remember anything and he is acting strangely? He could be a danger to himself and a danger to those around him.

At first, Mike is just hanging out with his friend, pretending as if he is getting his memory back, trying to adjust to the new world. Then, He is teaming up with his friend to create technology. He claims that this technology will make his friend’s world better, but Mike thinks that this is really an easy way to get into the homes of all the citizens on the new Earth. I was keeping track of this storyline, thought that the new tech was interesting, and couldn’t wait to see what happened next.

Then, the storyline took a turn. All of a sudden, Mike was crushing on this woman named Jane and was a part of some top-secret military team. I had no clue what was going on, and I didn’t figure it out. I was confused from that point forward. Why are there just random top-secret military teams on Earth? I thought that they may have been to catch Mike, as this was hinted at somewhere in the book, but my suspicions weren’t confirmed until I reread the synopsis when I was done with the novel. It just didn’t make sense. And then of course in Mike’s world everyone is just having sex with no strings attached all the time, so he has to get used to being in a normal Earth relationship, and this was…something. I can’t say that I didn’t like the romance storyline, but I didn’t love it. It felt like the characters had little to no chemistry, and then all of a sudden they were madly in love with each other.

There were little tidbits of story that I found interesting, like how Mike rewired his brain so that it would work properly, and how the messengers were affecting other people in Mike’s new Earth. And I loved the action scenes. The action scenes really drew me in, and kept me flying through the pages until they were over. But even great action scenes and okayish romance and interesting tidbits could not save the entire story for me.

I wouldn’t recommend this book, but if you are into sci-fi comedy, you might have a few good laughs with this story!

I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.

Overall Rating: 1.5 out of 5 books