girl, goddess, queen follows kore (later named persephone), who flees to the underworld when her father, zeus, and her mother, demeter, are searching for suitable gods for her to be married to. she finds that hades, the king of the underworld, isn’t as bad as the stories say - she’s much better off with him that anyone else - and this is a romance so you know what happens next.

this book is genuinely quite well-written. i have my bones to pick, and we’ll get there, but it easily meets a certain standard of writing. the prose is solid, the arcs overall make sense within the constructed world, the worldbuilding itself is decent in isolation, like it’s good. if it weren’t classical reception, or i didn’t know as much about classics, i probably would’ve rated it higher. unfortunately, not the world we live in.

so, let’s start there. there’s the obvious “oh it’s not the same as the original myth.” i get the point is that it’s “what if persephone chose hades,” and other characters have to fall in line to accompany that. in a vacuum, i have no issue. i’m more broadly annoyed with hades and demeter, how hades is consistently portrayed as the “least bad” greek god, and how demeter is a toxic mother. but, by itself, i get why the author made the choices she did with these characters. i dislike what this book contributes to, but it works fine in isolation.

the thing that i’m actually annoyed about is the nymphs. they are characterised as so sex-obsessed, persephone loves them but makes the “nymphomaniac” joke, and like. they Know. they know the horrors of men (and the gods). they know more actively, persephone is somewhat shielded, and nymphs are more often victims than goddesses. daphne is name-dropped. but they don’t care. they’re the feminine girls to serve as a contrast to persephone who is interested in her independence and is not like other girls (at the start). and she still has love for them, but i think this was a uniquely poor moment (the last paragraph is just an issue with every hades and persephone retelling). the nymphs should not be this stupid and wilfully ignorant. i also don’t get the juno i want, but i rarely ever do.

i also have to acknowledge that i am not the audience for ya (i’m 20, it’s not a quality or age thing, they just don’t speak to me as much anymore), or chosen one narratives (i am not the chosen one, she has a line near the end and my soul-deep reaction was “go fuck yourself”). this is probably why i couldn’t get behind persephone as a character. especially at the start. she tells us that she’s so good at pretending to be innocent, the perfect girl, holding her tongue, but her relationship with her mother tells us otherwise. persephone tells us otherwise. though she may not act super rebelliously, it’s certainly an impulse within her, constantly on her lips, she’s openly not okay with zeus’ definition of her or her role in the world. and, a reception issue which i think should have been handled differently, is how modern persephone feels. her view on independence and her culture and her mother feels more like a teenage girl dropped into her society than someone who understands how her culture treats her and has been forced to put up with it until she hits a breaking point. this is to the novel’s detriment; teenagers are smart, they can empathise with a character they don’t fully relate to, and i think it would make persephone more interesting, with a stronger arc, and build the world more fully.

i’m not an entire hater. hades and persephone were cute together (though i feel like it was obvious and they should have said something, but it wasn’t terrible miscommunication). i really enjoyed hades overall, even though this is not who i associate with hades. he was woke!!!! in the context of “this is a ya novel,” i much prefer bisexual consent king hades than shadow daddy hades x i can fix him persephone, because what do we treat as romantic what do we normalise blah blah blah this is a better model to show. i liked how unashamedly feminist it was, and i think it approached the idea of “the patriarchy hurts everyone, but it does harm women more” in a really balanced way, and it wasn’t “masculinity does not just hurt men because the poor straight men are perceived as gay.” the conversation was really balanced. i enjoyed the author’s prose a fair bit, and she clearly does know the mythic background, i just wish she had communicated certain elements more.

ultimately, i probably would’ve liked this more if the world building and names were changed just enough to Not be greek mythology. however i read this for classics book club so i probably wouldn’t have read it… but also i think that would’ve made bea fitzgerald less money and i genuinely wish her all the success in the world