by Emily Whitman
ages: 12+
First sentence: “Persophne. Daughter of Demeter, the harvest goddess.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

You know the story: Persephone, the daughter of the goddess Demeter, is walking through the fields of her mother’s realm, when Hades, god of the Underworld, opens a chasm in the ground and snatches Persephone away. Demeter is so distraught that she ceases to help mortals until their suffering is so bad that Zeus interferes, demanding Persephone’s return. Except, she’s eaten some pomegranate seeds, which binds her to the Underworld. The compromise is that she spends some time up on Earth with her mother, and the rest in the Underworld with Hades.

Except, as Whitman’s imagined it, that isn’t the story at all. Or, more specifically: not all of it. Whitman takes the basic myth and expands it, changing the motivations. Persephone — thank heavens — is no longer a passive character, totally at the whims of more powerful gods, but a acting, thinking, feeling person. She dislikes her mother, from whom she can’t seem to get much approval and who doesn’t accept that Persephone is growing up. She falls in love with Hades; though they sneak around behind Demeter’s back, he doesn’t kidnap her. And most of all, this Persephone makes choices.

Unfortunately, many of those choices were based on faulty information: both Hades and Demeter chose to refrain from telling Persephone information that would have helped her make better choices, or helped her be more at ease with the choices she did make. And this grated; both Hades and Demeter filled parental roles: they knew better than Persephone, and therefore limited her. Hades, especially, grated: he was trying to fill both the role of lover and parent, which kind of made him seem Edward-creepy. Most of the time, I wanted to smack him. And while we’re told that Demeter’s actions were motivated by love, we never really saw it. (Either that, or it’s some funny kind of love…)

All of that added up to making the book kind of… flat. I really wanted to like the book. I did like Persephone, as a character. And Whitman’s vision of the Underworld was interesting; it became not just a place for the shades to reside, but an actual kingdom, something that Persephone could work with and improve. (Though, as M pointed out, my perceptions of Greek mythology may be forever warped because of Percy Jackson.) But the gods-being-gods aspect of it kept me, at least. from really enjoying the story.