I loved this book! I’m not going to lie, I was a bit worried going into this book because I wasn’t the biggest fan of the first book in this series, “Neon Gods”. The first book follows Persephone and Hades’ story and this book follows the story of Psyche and Eros. The story of Persephone and Hades’ is one of my favorite stories in Greek Mythology. Hades especially, is such a formidable God and he’s so ominous, intense, stand offish, and the mystery of his persona is so intellectually attractive. You can’t help but want to learn more about him and how he came to love someone as light as Persephone.
Clearly, I had a lot of expectations going into the first book and unfortunately, they weren’t exactly met.
Psyche and Eros on the other hand, I don’t know much about. I briefly learnt about the significance of these two through the Webtoon Lore Olympus. After reading this book, I’m desperate to read more stories and retellings about them.
Psyche is one of the sisters of Persephone. She’s deemed to be the one closest to her cunning and witty mother, Demeter. She’s smart, cunning, and determined. She’s a plus sized character who in this story, assumes the role of an influencer. Psyche carries out a job that flaunts her public persona the way everyone in the city of Olympia aims to do, except she does it better.
Eros is the son of Aphrodite, her second hand man and ruthless personal hit man. There’s very few times, if at all none to be honest, where we get to see Aphrodite treat her son as a son. You can’t not feel for Eros. He’s surrounded by so much evil and death as his mother’s weapon that he doesn’t know a life beyond it. He accepts this image that he’s blood thirsty and enjoys his killings when in reality, it drains him of the very little “humanity” he has left.
The way these two characters meet is just great. We get to see Eros in his true form, terrifying, ruthless, and bloody from his latest mission. After an unfolding of misunderstandings, Eros and Psyche are forced to hide away in Eros’ apartment.
We’ve got forced proximity, the oops there’s only one bed, do you want to borrow my t-shirt, and the guess I’m willing to go against everything I stand for to protect you tropes and let me tell you, it’s an immaculate combination.
I loved learning more about the side characters we caught glimpses of in the past and wow oh wow, they’re already so fun and interesting to read about. I feel like in the first book, we don’t get to read from much of the side characters because Persephone isn’t in the society where all the Gossip Girl but make it Gossip God’s kind of action is happening.
In this book, we get to read a lot more about Helen, Calisto, and Perseus. I’m quite hoping to get a book about Perseus because he’s such an interesting character and while we did get to read more about him in this book, a lot of who he is and his past and motivations as a character is still pretty vague. Katee Robert knows how to give us little tid bits of gripping character development with each book and reel us in for the long run.
There were so many great discussions that took place in the book.
First of all, let’s talk about the plus size rep. It was amazing. It felt so authentic, so real, and you know me, I always tear up when I see myself represented in a book. Psyche talked about how hard it is to shop as a plus sized person and how society is constantly judging plus sized people.
“I am hardly that. It’s something that I’m reminded of constantly, especially with the public life I’ve chosen. There’s no escaping the way societal expectations scrape against my reality. I love my body. I’ve fought so incredibly hard to love my body, even if some days that feels like an ambition instead of truth. I’m still painfully aware that not everyone feels the same.”
Did I cry over that quote? Yes, yes I did.
She talks about protecting herself, her true authentic self, by using her public persona as an armor.
“When they hate you, it’s easier to pretend they hate the public version instead of you.”
That quote is something I relate to so hard. Even with people who I’m close to, there’s always pieces of myself that I keep closed off because I know that it’s not safe to open my true self to other people’s opinions and judgements. I’ve been there, done that, and it’s not a good feeling when it doesn’t go the way you want it to.
The only quip with this book is that I wish we got just a bit more from Psyche. My main issue with the first book was that Hades wasn’t Hades enough. We were constantly told that he’s evil, dark, and scary but we never got to see that side of him that much. In this book, we were told that Psyche is Demeter 2.0. In the beginning, I didn’t see how this was true but towards the end, we did get to see her inner Demeter come out. So it’s definitely better than the first book but I wish we got more.
Have you read this book? What did you think of it?