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  • A Touch of Ruin

  • Hades & Persephone, Book 2
  • Written by: Scarlett St. Clair
  • Narrated by: Meg Sylvan
  • Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (161 ratings)

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A Touch of Ruin cover art

A Touch of Ruin

Written by: Scarlett St. Clair
Narrated by: Meg Sylvan
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Publisher's Summary

Persephone's relationship with Hades has gone public, and the resulting media storm disrupts her normal life and threatens to expose her as the Goddess of Spring.

Hades, God of the Dead, is burdened by a hellish past that everyone's eager to expose in an effort to warn Persephone away.

Things only get worse when a horrible tragedy leaves Persephone's heart in ruin and Hades refusing to help. Desperate, she takes matters into her own hands, striking bargains with severe consequences.

Faced with a side of Hades she never knew and crushing loss, Persephone wonders if she can truly become Hades' queen.

Contains mature themes.

©2020 Scarlett St. Clair (P)2020 Tantor

What listeners say about A Touch of Ruin

Average Customer Ratings
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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Great captivating story

The author really knows how to keep you hooked and reading from page to page ! This series was definitely a gem and I’m really glad I found it!

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

First one was better

I enjoyed the first book, I personally found Persephone a little annoying in this book, I get her being mad at hades but she handled literally everything in her life so poorly and was super whiny and took out her pain on everyone around her. She just acted super immaturely. And man is there relationship toxic
They did everything but communicate with each other lol

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Emotional 😭

Re read A Touch of Ruin right now and it still hits me as hard as it did the first them around.

You can never prepare for a loss. Ruin is Sephys experience learning loss and how I feel like it must have been so weird being such a young immortal. Coming to terms with loss when you will live multiple life times.

Grief is also a weird and uncontrollable thing. My own grief I’ve described as a storm cloud. Theirs days were it’s just existing because it will always be with me and there’s other days where I don’t feel like I can breath because it’s a raging storm.

Ator is an incredibly unique read and experience.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Way too much Sex

Was hard to get through as there was so much sex like every chapter. I really just wanted to continue the story line so I skipped a lot of scenes. Definitely felt this read being very toxic relationship vibes, fixing all problems with sex. Just not healthy. Didn’t want to continue the series after this book but book 3 was way better

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

wow!!!

amazing!!! story had me fully immersed in the world and routing for the characters. I'm hooked.
and the narrator.....omg woman.....naughty naughty little thing. I'm now onto the 3rd book as I can't wait to see what is next.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Great story

Absolutely love this book and the whole series, the only trouble I had was a few of the “voices” were hard to get past. Other than that, very enjoyable!

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

A bit of a struggle..

I really enjoyed the first book in this series (I also highly recommend reading Game of Fate from Hades perspective before starting this book), but this one was sooo hard to get into.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do love this story. I love the world St. Clair has created and the characters are all so great and well-developed... I just struggled SO hard connecting with Persephone in this one.

She spends the first 80% of this book sorting her sh*t out and it’s painful in some places just to get through it. She is so insecure and it was frustrating as a listener when she would jump to these insane conclusions because of her insecurity over her relationship. I understand that her trauma is a big part of her and having to overcome it is part of her character growth, but it was very hard to connect with at times as her reactions were SO over the top.

One glaring error that I struggled with was how in multiple places St. Clair mistakenly refers to Antony as an ogre... he is a cyclops, we know this, this bugged me. And Hades was notably absent throughout most of this book. I hope the next story from his perspective sheds some light on this.

I will say though, the book is worth finishing and the ending makes up for a lot of the rough parts in the middle. I’m really looking forward to the next book and I hope we see Persephone grow more (and maybe complain about how everyone else is so wrong and she is so right, a little less!).

Sylvan does an excellent job of capturing the emotion throughout the story and she is great at creating a distinct variety of character voices. However I struggled more throughout this book as her voice, in attempting to match Persephone’s glum mood throughout the story, made just about every sentence sound like a huge depressed sigh. It does pick up (thankfully) later on when the tone of the story changes, but I had a hard time in the beginning adjusting to this change from the first book.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Great book but way too much sex

I have binge listened to this series and just purchased the book from Hades POV, I love them. It’s a good story and the narrator does a brilliant job of bringing it to life.

However, in the second book, if you cut out all the sex scenes the book would literally be 2 hours long. There is very little plot exploration and everything is solved whilst they’re having sex. Like come on, someone important to you just died and you’re talking about it whilst having sex directly after it happened???? Literally every issue is solved whilst having sex. Persephone lies and betrays him? Don’t worry we’ll just sex it out.
Honestly by the end of the book I would cringe every time they started to have sex because I was just so over it, and that’s coming from someone who loves a good smutty scene.

There really wasn’t much else to the book other than a vague attempt at a plot around the smut. Plot points that could have made for a very interesting read had they been explored in more depth were skimmed over and resolved in a page or without truly being resolved.

Hades was absent for most of this book, only appearing to ‘save the day’ or for smutty scenes. Persephone, where can I start? Mistake after mistake without ever really learning from them. She lied, she deceived, she betrayed. It was frustrating and I feel like she becomes very preachy in a lot of places for someone who is screwing everything up so badly. I found her very selfish through a lot of this and Hades just took her back without voicing how it made him feel because of good sex.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first book and the third looks set to be amazing too, but this one became very repetitive and a little cringe toward the end. I’d definitely recommend listening just to set up for the third, but don’t expect amazing an amazing plot because there isn’t really one.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

I love this book but…

I love these books so much. My only complaint is there is way too much sex. I’m a fan of sex scenes but this series goes way over board and was even way too much for me. It seemed to be every half hour there was a sex scene. Made it very difficult to listen to anywhere and I ended up forwarding through most of them because it was so excessive. It was super disappointing but otherwise I loved the books.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

The first book was better.

I struggled to get thru this book just…I found the was lack of growth in this story to be disappointing and there was no character growth just…meh.

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