It is informational enough for me to use as a source for my upcoming paper, but it certainly feels like my brain exploded in the middle of reading it. It doesn’t help that the author assumes her readers can understand Ancient Greek and Latin.

But wow, does this book show its age. Every time the concept of one of the mythological figures not being cisgender came up, the author would refer to it with a slur, and call it “sex confusion.” And yet at one point, in her effort to make everything in Greek mythology seem mostly cishet (good luck with that) she refers to Ganymede as a woman, calling him Ganymeda and a slightly different version of Hebe.

For those of you who do not know, Ganymede is the male cupbearer and lover of Zeus. Zeus was so taken by this man that he kicked his and Hera’s daughter Hebe out of the cup bearing position, just so he could make this man a god, and to keep him by his side. And on the off chance there is an obscure myth in which Ganymede is a woman and Zeus’s daughter, I double checked. There is not. Either the author, or the source she drew from, changed Ganymede into a woman. And even if it was the source she used, the fault still lies with the author, for this is so easy to double check (and no, it was not a typo, either. She definitely refers to Ganymede as a slightly evolved version of Hebe, and calls him Ganymeda).