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\u2019t go into how the author\u2019s take is interesting for fear of spoiling, but I did like the originality of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately there isn\u2019t 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\u2019d think that living for an eternity as a god would make someone a little wiser and thoughtful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cyou\u201d. For some reason it began to grate on me but it is throughout the whole book making it a chore to get through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh well, hopefully the next book is better. I\u2019m going to read Transcription by Ben Lerner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019t go into how the author\u2019s take is interesting for fear of spoiling, but I did like the originality of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Books: Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-10Y","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}