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language: English
country: USA
year: 2022
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 10.8.22-19.8.22
I found Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing to be an incredibly frustrating book.
if this were a secondary world fantasy, I would have few qualms about giving it somewhere in the 4 to 4.5 star range on Storygraph. there were moments where the prose faltered, but the speculative concept — the gods as hungry cthonic entities engaged in a millennia-long blood feud who regard humans as similar to ants and feed on human sacrifice, and one demigod who is determined to have no part in their cruel wars — is impeccable and it’s well executed (up until the last six pages, which wouldn’t be an issue in a secondary world anyway). in a setting like Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy I would have been losing my mind. I absolutely loved the unsettling and then outright horrifying portrayal of Iphianassa, in particular.
unfortunately, this is not a secondary world fantasy. instead it attempts to be a historical fantasy version of the Trojan War, taking for granted that the people of Wilusa were Hittite-speakers, giving Patroklos an Egyptian wife, and for some reason making the Amazons (of Anatolia)…Etruscan-speakers, I think? the theonyms are Etruscan, in any case. as I observed last night, and as my “for some reason” in the previous sentence perhaps suggests, the linguistic inconsistencies and, more generally, the extremely dubious handling of social and historical context (Akhenaten…) drove me crazy for…the whole book, unfortunately.
then there’s the problem of the gods. Deane takes the interpretatio graeca of various Egyptian and Near Eastern deities entirely at face value: Zeus is Taru is Teshub is Amun. and Indra, for some reason, which is just plain wrong. Athena is also the Aten, based on…the fact that their names sound alike, I guess? I hated this so much, both from a historical perspective and because I just think it’s incredibly tacky to try to fold all of the world’s religions into one single cosmology. and I do mean all of the world’s religions: while on a trip to Egypt in search of the ~unstoppable weapons~ of Akhenaten, Achilles and Meryapi (Patroklos’s wife) meet the spirit of a trans woman named Kiya, who was in a throuple with Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Kiya’s deadname, we’re told, is Joseph of Kna’an. she was thrown down a well by “her people” for being trans. she had divinely inspired visions. the implications of this are truly insane. is the Jewish god supposed to be another aspect of Zeus?
I also was a little underwhelmed by the handling of Achilles’s transness. the portrayal of the transphobia she experienced in childhood was really effective, and I liked the way other trans characters were integrated into the narrative, but I thought having Athena magically transform Achilles in, like, chapter three such that all of the Achaeans — even the ones who previously had been violently transphobic and homophobic towards her — immediately and unquestioningly recognize her as a woman was kind of a cop-out. having Damia (her lover on Skyros, also a trans woman) immediately reject her out of bitterness after this transformation also felt a bit…I don’t know. like, “oh, no, I’m being kicked out of my found trans community because I’m too good at passing/I’ve transitioned too perfectly!” I don’t doubt that to some extent this reflects real dynamics (Damia’s bitterness that Achilles is magically gifted something Damia can never have perhaps parallels class-differentiated ability to medically transition), and there was an attempt to reconcile at the end, but I feel like it could have been handled differently.
now. the last six pages. these involve Helen (an incredibly destructive goddess/immortal entity dedicated to destroying the world, cyclically, basically out of boredom) writing Achilles’s transness and then all ancient trans women out of the historical record, using her divine power to isolate trans people from each other, and generally being responsible for all of the bad things in world history up to the looming disasters of our present. this is just lazy, I think! transphobia — for example — is a social structure and this instead takes human agency (for creating or destroying it) entirely out of the equation. it’s all just Helen. the third to last page features a direct appeal to the reader from now-divine Achilles-Pyrrha: “You must prepare yourself.” (because Helen is coming back.) I hate this! it’s a really heavy-handed attempt to ~make the book relevant~, but it already was relevant in the way it was thinking about war, violence, intergenerational trauma! you didn’t need this incredibly cheesy conclusion.
it also ultimately positions itself as the true history of Achilles (“On Earth, people remember my name. The read that I was Pyrrha, Achilles, a woman who lived for twenty years and died, a goddess’s daughter, a mother by the grace of Aphrodite and by my own will.”), which I feel like undermines everything else it was doing, not least because the title page explicitly identifies the book as a novel. what this does, in effect, after all of its clunky efforts at historicity and then at “present relevance”, is turn around and say, “this is about another world after all”. either it’s fiction or it’s secret history; you can’t have it both ways. and, ultimately, you didn’t need any of this! you could have just stopped with Achilles consuming and imprisoning Helen (you could even have kept Helen writing Achilles’s transness out of history!) and then had the last chapter as a kind of epilogue!
also, on a very petty note, sexy and sensitive Agamemnon??????????????
so, in conclusion: I would have loved to love this book. I think if it had been a secondary world fantasy, even one that explicitly framed itself as a fantasy retelling of the Trojan War, it would have been incredible. unfortunately, it was not. but I can’t give it a rating on Storygraph because the other people who didn’t like it disliked it for bad and incorrect reasons (apparently partly a result of an active smear campaign against the writer! delightful!).
moods: adventurous, dark