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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.

I love this book because I honestly have no idea how Marquez is going to weave everything together. There is a mystery story of who is posting the lampoons that defame the people who hold the wealth and power in the city. But these people continue to live their personal and private lives. Things are building to some sort of apocalyptic head… but what is going to happen? And to whom?

There is a fundamental disconnect resulting from the abuse of a power imbalance. The Mayor, as an agent of the current party, wants the folk of the town to forget the deaths of the men who died during the revolution in favor of the alleged progress that the new party says it is bringing. This section develops the subplot of the Judge’s wife, who is not legally married to him.

Oh shiiit! This is the town with the widow Montiel, who sat by while her husband gutted the entire town by turning informant against the people he had politicked alongside. Marquez sketches José Montiel’s lawyer, who is guilty in a similar sense, and also retells the story of the mayor who gets his tooth pulled without anesthesia, with some significant changes to the circumstances.

Okay. So this is NOT Macondo, but it references the town and the events of the story where the birds were falling dead out of the sky, whose name I can’t remember, and the 100 year old priest (who, in a charming detail, was found playing cops and robbers with the children). Did I confuse two different Fathers in the Big Mama’s Funeral collection??? I feel like I need a character flowchart o.O

Within the framework of Macondo, I am pretty sure that this is an important book in tying together the glimpses of the town that we have seen in Leaf Storm and the No One Writes collection. There’s Father Angél, for one, and the Mayor with the rotting tooth who the dentist takes vengeance on. The opening crisis - a man who murders his wife’s adulterous lover, a musician - is a big way to kick off the novel.

I suppose, if nothing else, this novel gives us some first-hand insight as to what the magic wars mentioned in the third section of The Colour of Magic were really like. It also has a moment of self-reflection where all of Rincewind’s quest-companions realize that they aren’t great at the things that they do, which is part of the thrust of this story. The bit about the malfunctioning carpet is genius.

I had forgotten about Nigel, who is basically a rewrite of Twoflower except where Twoflower just sort of wanted to SEE and accidentally got to DO, Nigel intends to BE a barbarian hero and is just terrible at it. The extent to which this book retreads the first three Discworld books wears just a bit.

Conina is awesome. A beautiful woman who wants to be a hairdresser and is good at it but is even better at killing and sneaking and looting.

This book reuses a lot of the elements of Pratchett’s first three books, what with the sentient staff (something that I THOUGHT was going on in Equal Rites), the focus on the Unseen University, and a woman who is born to do something that is typically male-gendered.

I vaguely remember the barbarian hairdresser but she is such a fun character for the time that we have her. I think that she’s Cohen’s granddaughter or something? I DEFINITELY forgot about the talking hat up until she stole it. My mind is boggling at the paperback cover with the generic 80s-90s illustration.

Oh god I have no idea what’s about to happen

The problem here is assuming that Count Olaf could ever love another human being o.O let alone someone as annoying and noxious as Esme. But Quigly and Violet’s implied romantic moment was very sweet for this depressing but humorous series. Also, the Fridge code is utterly ridiculous.

Just truckin’ along. Sunny holds her own against the ghastly troupe of Olaf and his hangers-on, but I’m interested in who the horrid couple are, which one of Olaf’s associates dies in this book, and 😬😬😬 whether Quigley will survive this volume 😬😬😬

I’m not proud that I called Quigley as the survivor during this book - Snickett suspiciously invoked his name - but I FUCKING CALLED IT!!!!!!!