Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

 

I couldn't tell you when exactly I fell out of love with Greek Myth, but it happened somewhere along the way. This is a book that does a wonderful job of reminding me of at least part of the why: The deities (and in many cases, the heroes) of Greek Myth rarely behave much differently than spoiled toddlers. In this book that is absolutely true. The monsters aren't monsters, the heroes aren't heroes (Perseus especially comes off as an annoying twit--but so do Hermes and Athena); the gods are privilege personified, and the kings are better than the gods only for having less actual power. There's enough wit and anger here to qualify this as satire, I think; unfortunately the wit fades over the course of the novel, and by the end there's just the bitter taste of anger, before the story kinda fritters away. There is some sparkle to the prose, here, especially in the first quarter or so, but the characters have a tendency to kinda blur around the edges. While I started the novel with spirits and hopes high, by the end I mostly came away with the sense this novel had One Weird Trick, and I just got tired of it.