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Jo 💜

Beth 💜

Thus far we have a very sweet “getting to know you” romance with a lot of moralism from the Marche matriarch, but pleasant moralism. For some reason I had in my head that Alcott was English and forgot the biography information about how she grew up among the likes of the transcendentalists. I did a double take when I realized that the war was the CIVIL War (American).

So I see now that this is more of a quadrilogy except the first two books, Little Women and (gulp) Good Wives, are published as part one and part two of Little Women. I have only the faintest idea of what I’m getting into as I can see that many readers fall in love with the first section, only to have their hearts broken by the second.

It’s time

To read

little women

(I think that one of the two teenage misfits from The Road Through the Wall loved Jo’s Boys. I don’t exactly remember, but I know that I’ve read a character who gushed over Alcott and specifically Jo’s Boys, so - beyond Little Women being an enormous classic, I’m excited to finish out this trio.)

Still building in suspicion and motives. I wonder if the twist is that Despard, who was not actually a murderer, did it in defense of a woman? The book has demonstrated but not highlighted his protective nature.

The book is laying it pretty thick on Anne Meredith, enough to wonder whether she may end up murdering her friend Rhoda on account of Rhoda talking to Ariadne and what ELSE Rhoda might say. But, well, there’s no telling what Christie is going to write to cast suspicion on Mrs. Lorrimer and Despard.

It’s fun having Poirot and Battle in the same space. I don’t think that - no, I haven’t read the short stories where Oliver first appears. (Not Poirot, but I also don’t think that I’ve seen them on the shelves!) Race had a bit part in The Man in the Brown Coat, I believe. We are now in the “getting to know you” part of the book where the sleuths chat up the suspects.

Okay, THIS is a fun setup. Christie is up front in the foreword. There are four suspects, each perfectly capable of committing the murder and with a viable motive. The question of who did it thus becomes purely psychological. Who of the four would have taken the opportunity to when given ?????

lol no.

I disliked the exaggerated, maudlin tone of Athena’s Child. The sheer disconnect of the conversation that Andromeda has with her parents about marrying Perseus has enough passive-aggressive energy on both sides to fuel a large high school.

I can’t with the modern tone to the banter of the Gods. I get that Haynes is wanting to obliterate any sympathy that the reader may have for Perseus. We don’t need another story about Perseus the Hero; that is the default narrative. But the banter directed at him turns the story into a farce, a lampoon. However, writing the next part of the story from the POV of the head is a nice touch.

The older priest is Poseidon himself, maybe?

Hermes and Athena haranguing Perseus has strong comedy vibes. It cuts a fine line between making you feel sorry for him - the gods are cruel and the Gorgoneion passage shows contempt for sympathetic readers - and repudiating him for being an ignoramus who stumbled his way into the big leagues.

I thought that the Perseus from Medusa’s Sisters was a serial bumbler but this incarnation is the epitome of frightened fisher-boy.

I realize now that the inclusion of Hephaestus’s creep-crush on Athena is instrumental in Haynes establishing a broader narrative of the power struggle between Athena and Poseidon, including the child of Heph’s lust casting the winning vote that granted Athena Attica.

it took me until Haynes wrote about the vengeance of the nereids to remember just who Andromeda was in relation to Perseus’s story. It also has several different narrators, but it isn’t until you read the statement of Cornix that the tonal shift of the Gorgoneion sections starts to make sense. I’m not entirely sure where the Athena / Hephaestus sexual assault subplot is going, given the “Stone” narrator.

When I initially saw reviews for this book I read that, for a book that is presumably about Medusa, it spends precious little time with her. And that’s true. The Greek retellings that I have read thus far usually turn into a sort of whirlwind tour of several other parts of the mythology. Medusa is about as minor a character as anyone else in this ever-expanding network of personalities from antiquity.

This is a very unusual take on Athena. She is petulant, frivolous. Her babbling at the unnamed Heracles is parodic and reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s satire. She is incensed during the Gigantomachy and skins the chest of Pallas so that she can use it as a breastplate. I mean, that last one is straight from the myth, but Haynes’s retelling has a bizarre, erotic subtext to it.

omg Athena I’m fuckin dyin here

“If you get trodden on by a giant or a god - which wouldn’t be intentional on our part, incidentally, but in the heat of battle one of us might step in the wrong place and there you’d be . . . Well, would have been. Anyway, it would be painless. Probably very painful just before it was painless, but not for long”

HOLY SHIT let me rape you in this temple or I’ll rape some random girl of your choice to death while she drowns???

Uh, every one of these Medusa-oriented books has been significantly different. This book juxtaposes Hephaestus, Athena, and Medusa. In this story, the mortal gorgon’s only superhuman feature is a pair of leathery wings, and she is raised - like a foundling - by her more monstrous sisters. Hephaestus’s conception is Hera’s revenge for Zeus raping Métis - who Zeus swallowed, begetting Athena.

This is the last of my Medusa-themed retellings lying around. I read Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar so I’m excited to see where this will go and how it will contrast against what I’ve already seen in Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece, Athena’s Child, and Medusa’s Sisters (not to downplay depictions in other material like Lore).

Yeah, it’s Ged. Yeah, he is looking for the talisman mentioned earlier in the story. GED’s appearance causes conflict between Tenar’s autonomy and her cult-given purpose. For the reader, especially one who had read A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged’s vague personal history reveals quite a bit more about the nature of the Nameless Ones.

So it isn’t until we are nearly halfway into the book, when Tenar-cum-Arha is a teenager and her more knowledgeable and less malicious High Priestess has died, where we encounter a wizard of Earthsea. I’m pretty sure that it’s Ged, but who knows?

Fifty pages in, we are in a very different part of Earthsea that more resembles a bizarre pagan conclave found in, say, Zothique. We have a young girl who is turning into a tyrant, human sacrifice, and beings from the world before this one - the Nameless Ones (I suspect that they’re dragons) - and the girl is the purported reincarnation of the Eaten One. (Mr. Eaten? A reckoning will not be postponed!)

Any idea of the Mayor being a sympathetic figure has completely evaporated.

😬😬😬

Lots of fun interpersonal details continue to develop. Meanwhile, a conflict seems imminent.

At this point, I’m not sure that the true writer of the lampoons will ever be revealed, but I want to know how this all plays out.

Things escalate. The Mayor seems like he’s good-natured in some aspects but in others he clearly flexes his full self in the authority that the government has invested in him. Martial law is established in the town, like, the day after the circus arrives in town. Also, this is the town where Mina of the beautiful artificial flowers (and her blind grandmother!!) live.