Sweet Venom ~ Tera Lynn Childs review

Sweet Venom (Sweet Venom Trilogy #1)
Katherine Tegen Books
September 6, 2011
352 pages
Amazon/Goodreads

Grace and her family have just moved to San Francisco. Starting at a fancy new school, it's a move full of tons of new possibilities. One of thing, however, that Grace wasn't expecting to be a possibility was monster sightings. . . Yet, when a minotaur strolls into the room, that's just what happens. Matters get even more complicated when a girl that looks just like here shows up to fight the unbelievable creatures.

Gretchen's definitely more used to monsters than Grace - she's been after them night after night for years. They complicate her life, but it's something that has to be done. That night's monster is just another evil thing that needs to be gotten rid of, to her, only a little out of the ordinary. What is very of the ordinary is the girl who looks just like her.

Now that the two girls have seen each other, Grace will learn why she's seeing these 'monsters,' creatures she thought were only mythological beings. And Gretchen will have to share her knowledge, that she - and now, apparently Grace, too - is a descendant of the Gorgon Medusa and it's up to them to protect the mortal world. The evil creatures are only supposed to be able to enter the human world one at a time - and Gretchen finds them and kills them, sending them back, but now there are more.

The girls will have to figure out why . . . all while figuring out their relationship.


Sweet Venom was an incredibly enjoyable read. There have been a lot of books to twist or draw on different aspects of Greek mythology for their plot, but I don't think any (or at least any I have read) have used Medusa and the Gorgons, at least no in this sense. It was very refreshing.

It was great that each of the girls has their own story for how they were being raised. They were each different yet also very believable. It made them unique characters and gave them very different backgrounds. Each story was something not boring or ordinary- no girl got standout story and no girl got the standard, pat story, either.

 It made things more interesting when they were brought together. It was obvious that they had their own personalities but once they interacted for a while, you could see the connection and that they were sisters even.

It's also amazing that there was an overlying problem/evil facing them. Throughout the book there was the story of Grace starting at the new school, Gretchen missing Ursula, the sisters' reuniting and their relationship but their was also the Big Bad(ness) storyline.

With a Big Bad storyline spanning the whole novel, Sweet Venom mirrors a Buffy season: Buffy always had to deal with interpersonal (and intrapersonal) things aside from whatever baddie she was dealing with and the sisters in Sweet Venom have to do the same. With kickbutt girls, boys I can see become crush-worthy, and monsters galore - it's like a Buffy fix in book form. I LOVE it!

This is the first in a trilogy and while there was a conclusion at the end of the book, there were also several things at the end of the book left unresolved - it left me eagerly awaiting the next book.

9/10


thank you to the publisher for my copy of this book