Mythic: definitely a twist on [Orpheus / Eurydice] within the pantheon of the Grecian God myths!
Hmmm as I periodically think, I wish Goodreads let you give book half star ratings because this definitely positively falls under a 3.5 star rating.
I think I wasn’t as into this as I thought I would be given the blurb, and then towards the end I was very into it and pretty shocked to find out that I only had about half an hour left–not because I thought there was more story (we were pretty quickly barreling towards the natural conclusion) but because I was indeed enjoying this quite a bit.
As I noted when I first saw the review for this book, it reminds me of the Bagenders series of fanfic from Ye Olde Times, subtitled as such:
And it came to pass that the Fellowship were granted immortality for they had saved Middle Earth; and so they went their separate ways…
But some fellowships were not meant to be broken…
History has become legend; legend has become myth, and myth has become merchandising: A three-bedroom semi in a town in the north of England, 2001.
In a similar but not quite as funny/irreverent vein, it has been thousands of years since the glory days of Olympus and a giant mountain has turned into a dilapidated townhouse in London where a subset of the well known Grecian gods of ancient times barely put up with one another. Apollo and Aphrodite have picture perfect, boring sex in the bathroom, Artemis is a dog walker now that her dogs have foresaken her, and Hermes is the only one who seems to have a constant job given the importance of money and time and messages in our modern day.
They’re all terrible people–fatphobic, sexist, mortalist(?)–but unfortunately all that other religion stuff is just myth and the only true gods are this lot. They might be useless and “behaving badly” (to put it LIGHTLY–the book starts with Artemis coming across a ex-Goldman-banker-turned-eucalyptus who is in her new arboreal state due to an unwillingness to fellate Apollo, and honestly there’s nothing to do and she’s stuck like that forever or until her tree is chopped down, which it is a few chapters later) but they’re also the only ones standing between life and desolation of no sun (Apollo) no moon (Artemis) no vegetation (Demeter) etc.
I think the premise is a bit thin for the amount of weight it’s meant to carry, but I’m also a fan of world building and the humor one can pull from a more-realized set of ‘rules.’ As it were, I could see the ending coming from a mile away (ish) but I was more than happy with the route that got me there!
