Book Review: Lore Olympus Volume Five by Rachel Smythe

Lore Olympus: Volume Five by Rachel Smythe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A relationship is ending, a relationship is beginning, a secret revealed to the audience, and it’s revealed to someone who is furious that the event happened and was hidden from him, oh and the female protagonist disappears. Lore Olympus Volume Five by Rachel Smythe finds Hades and Persephone begin a relationship after the former breaks up with Minthe but things get complicated when we learn how Kore became Persephone.

Covering episodes #103-126 of her webcomic, Smythe zeros in on Persephone’s backstory both from a brief glimpse from her point-of-view but other investigating her life before Olympus. However, the two protagonists don’t take a backseat as Hades attempts to figure out how to deal with his feelings and Persephone tries to continue to figure out things, Smythe’s continual work on deepening the characters really pays off in this volume because as the two most important characters gain layers it allows secondary characters to get more layers as well strengthening the overall piece. Once again Smythe’s artwork and choices to denote the different types of immortals—nymphs, gods, Olympians, Titans—makes the worldbuilding better and the colorizing choices allow the reader to realize something is up when a character’s shading darkness or lightens or completely changes for a few panels. Unlike the last volume, this one—though honestly, I was reading it on and off for a month—resonated better. I can’t tell you the reason why because frankly I don’t know why I had the issue with Volume Four, but things clicked for me in this one better maybe more things happening allowed me to appreciate the two protagonist’s struggles more because I knew other things were going actively without them knowing about it.

Lore Olympus Volume Five by Rachel Smythe continues with compelling characters, expanding the narrative out but keeping it from bloating, and great artwork. To say the least the way the volume’s ending has me interested in what is next.

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