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onceuponanisabel
I'm not exactly sure why I couldn't get into this... I suspect it's the culmination of a change that's been coming for a long time: I'm not sure I can really do YA so much anymore. Maybe it's just my mood -- I've been reading pretty much exclusively romances recently, so maybe it's a briefer change in the wind. There was nothing that stands out as bad about this, I just could not for the life of me get into it. The stories were an interesting aspect of it but other than that the plot generally crawled and I had trouble getting behind the main romance given where it started.
This was interesting because I think the book was very successful at what it set out to do but unfortunately, I, a college student who has taken many, many, many, many physics classes, am not the target audience and while I got very little information out of this that I didn't already know, I appreciated how fun this book would have been for a younger version of myself, a girl with a burgeoning interest in space who would go on to literally major in rocket science.
I'm going to quickly cover my actual review of this book, but then I have a tangent to get into (lol). This rating is not for the romance (although I did enjoy it, it wasn't a 5 star romance). It is for the hope and the love and the peace and the forgiveness that permeates this book. It is about healing from trauma and moving towards a more beautiful future. And that's just what I needed tonight.
“Treachery had been paid back with kindness: such was the rule of the queen of the dead.”
I've been thinking, because of this book, about retellings. The nature of them.
There's a lot of controversy around the Hades and Persephone myth, particularly around the recent-ish trend of retelling it into a romance rather than a violent and brutal rape and kidnapping. So here are my unsolicited two cents:
Hades and Persephone is a story. Persephone is not a real person being talked over and erased with these retellings. It is not injustice against her to give her a happy ending rather than a tragic one.
I see nothing wrong with using a known narrative structure to tell the story you want to tell.
As a sidebar response to one gripe I saw about this book: I do not think the existence of this story implies the author's lack of knowledge of mythology (although, to be honest, I do not require it of her. I do not think an academic knowledge of ancient Greek society is required to be inspired by a well-known story).
“Treachery had been paid back with kindness: such was the rule of the queen of the dead.”
I've been thinking, because of this book, about retellings. The nature of them.
There's a lot of controversy around the Hades and Persephone myth, particularly around the recent-ish trend of retelling it into a romance rather than a violent and brutal rape and kidnapping. So here are my unsolicited two cents:
Hades and Persephone is a story. Persephone is not a real person being talked over and erased with these retellings. It is not injustice against her to give her a happy ending rather than a tragic one.
I see nothing wrong with using a known narrative structure to tell the story you want to tell.
As a sidebar response to one gripe I saw about this book: I do not think the existence of this story implies the author's lack of knowledge of mythology (although, to be honest, I do not require it of her. I do not think an academic knowledge of ancient Greek society is required to be inspired by a well-known story).
