Two not great books in a row. This one has an interesting take on the labors of Hercules (Heracles) and tells his story through both his point of view and his patron goddess Hera. I won’t go into how the author’s take is interesting for fear of spoiling, but I did like the originality of it.
Unfortunately there isn’t much else I liked about the book. The author has modernized the speech to the level of a contemporary American high school student, which gets old quickly. Especially the character of Hera comes off as an angry tween – you’d think that living for an eternity as a god would make someone a little wiser and thoughtful.
A lot of the book is concerned with how Heracles treats with kindness, and through this the author manages to wedge in uses of alternative pronouns, as well as overly-emphasized LGBTQ themes. It all made me wonder who the target audience was for this book.
The format of alternating points of view means that we get a lot of direct messages to the read as if the character is praying or speaking to someone (or their image of someone) which means that there is a whole lot of the word “you”. For some reason it began to grate on me but it is throughout the whole book making it a chore to get through.
Oh well, hopefully the next book is better. I’m going to read Transcription by Ben Lerner.
