I was honestly extremely pleasantly surprised by this book. Poetry collections aren't usually my thing but one thing that is? Greek mythology. So I thought I'd give this book a try and I really, really enjoyed it. Yes, it's true that a lot of the messages from this book have been said before. But overall, I liked the way Mateer delivered them in a new way. I loved Aphrodite's passages for their revisionism and their feminism and for making me view a Goddess I'd mostly dismissed in a new light.

"They married me off in the stories so they could call me an adulteress, but I brought the god of war to his knees."

As for The Poet, who writes the other half of the book and interacts with Aphrodite in her poems, her story, for me, was slightly less compelling just because, like I said before, it was a story I'd heard many times before, and unlike the Aphrodite narrative, it wasn't told in a particularly different way. However, comparing the two stories was fun and interesting.

The book was also extensively illustrated, and while some of them were a bit Instagram feminist (did I just make up a fun new term?) I do feel like they contributed positively to the book overall.

Just a note, I received an eARC of this book from NetGalley, but the formatting was a bit janky so I don't know exactly how the line breaks were supposed to be. I feel like, because of that, I didn't quite get the full effect of the poetry, but I still really enjoyed it. Take from that what you will.