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What was suppose to be the big twists towards the end of the book fell flat because the world and lore weren't there for the twists to have any impact.
As a professor of literature, I do understand why this admission would be upsetting to some, seem lazy and appropriating to others and even wreak of privilege to still more.It’s an insult to my intelligence as a reader, it’s a big fat middle finger to the concept of a story as a whole, and it was genuinely painful to read. A fantasy romance, by dazzling new talent Sarah Underwood, inspired by Greek mythology and the tale of Penelope’s twelve hanged maids.
Leto is like no other heroine I've read, she is passionate, strong and genuine, she only wants revenge for what she suffered. Mathias is weirdly passive and honestly pathetic, with no reason for me to even consider caring about him. And we heard a bit about your criticisms, but what other things did you find weren’t so great about it? Here’s a particularly egregious example: The twelve girls sentenced to die are chosen by Poseidon by receiving a scale-mark along their necks.Seeing white Anglophones publishing their “refinements” of foreign myths (Greek in this case, another example would be Ancient Chinese myths), and so many white academics occupying African American sections on bookshelves, upsets and demotivates me dreadfully.
My whole community of friends who love Ancient Greece are literally all queer/trans, and we unilaterally agree this is awful. It is never explained how exactly the murder of more girls is meant to absolve Ithaca of its crimes. You can’t take an integral part of Greek history and culture and divorce it from its roots to tell a shallow, anachronistic “love story” because you read some Madeline Miller and thought it sounded cool.
Taking the narrative thread of Penelope's twelve hanged maids and weaving a new story set generations later (so, not a retelling of The Odyssey), Lies is about balances of power and how a curse borne of grief and anger can echo through centuries, creating cycles of sorrow. Girl, I have sixteen translations of it, and twenty-three of The Iliad, you're not going to impress me with bragging about owning that many translations if you don't read them.
The writing style and narrative voice alone has me enthralled, and I thought it an accomplished debut. I didn't know what to expect, I knew there was LGBTQ representation, that there would be magic and a Greek mythology background. The combination of canon Greek mythology with the ‘curse’ following the events of the Odyssey made for. poc authors are often turned away because greek mythology retellings have been done so much, and retellings of their own mythology are heavily scrutinized and need to meet high standards, yet this white author was handed a six figure deal and didn’t even read the original work that her book claims to be retelling.It's a sequel slash spinoff that could honestly be set in an entirely different universe and it would make no difference, which is why I won't touch the "she didn't read the Odyssey" thing.
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