Read: February 17 – February 24
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Summary:
Three thousand years ago, a god told a lie. Now, only a goddess can tell the truth. Persephone has everything a daughter of Zeus could want–except for freedom. She lives on the green earth with her mother, Demeter, growing up beneath the ever-watchful eyes of the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus. But when Persephone meets the enigmatic Hades, she experiences something new: choice. Zeus calls Hades “lord” of the dead as a joke. In truth, Hades is the goddess of the underworld, and no friend of Zeus. She offers Persephone sanctuary in her land of the dead, so the young goddess may escape her Olympian destiny. But Persephone finds more than freedom in the underworld. She finds love, and herself. (via Goodreads)
Review:
Look, I don’t like rating books one star. And I feel bad that this is in the same category as Don Delillo books. I also don’t like not finishing books, but I was really tempted to dnf this. I powered through because it was relatively short and, to be honest, I paid a decent amount of money to get it.
But God. It took a lot of effort. I so wanted this book to be great! A lesbian retelling of the Hades and Persephone myth? Sign me the h*ck up! But here’s the thing – there wasn’t enough myth. Diemer took the bare minimum of the myth and used the names Hades and Persephone and then just kind of…took it from there. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because God knows there’s a million different versions of the myths, but it felt like she kind of just used the names to use the names. Like Pallas and Charon, they were just included as kind of a shout out to their respective myths.
Secondly, it was too black and white. It’s easy to make Zeus the villain, because Zeus makes a very evil villain, but the dichotomy between Zeus = bad, the rest of the gods = good is…not accurate. The whole thing with gods is that you cannot apply human morality to them, because they are not human. So Zeus being all bad while Hades was a perfect woman? Inaccurate and, frankly, lazy. And because of that the book was boring for most of the time. When there was conflict, the conflict only lasted a few pages. There just wasn’t enough there. It was a bland retelling of a really fascinating myth and I’m super upset about it.
tl;dr: boring and lazy and uneventful. I respect Diemer’s attempt to create some cool lesbian fiction but it didn’t work out.
Yet Another Book Blogger 