A Girlfriend’s Guide to Gods by Maria Dahvana Headley
My rating: 4/5 cats
Here’s the reality, girl, girlfriend, goddess, goddamn goner: You’re gonna have to get out of hell all by yourself.
this is lovely and anthemic, and despite all the cussin’ and fuckin’ (or perhaps because of them), this is a perfect story to give teengirls on the cusp of womanhood—a litany of the perils of being a female in love, with youth’s tendency to elevate the object of your affection to godlike status, whether that god be orpheus, icarus, zeus, etc, reducing your status to a rapt spongelike receptacle to yer boys’ questionable tastes, a shiny accessory establishing his desirability, an unacknowledged helpmeet in the accolades he receives, a lover ignoring his extracurricular conquests, left in emotional hells of your own making again and again until you learn to scab your wounds into educational marks of survival and come into your own godhood, disheveled but blazing.
This is the fourth myth, unwritten in the larger canon, but it goes like this: You will be the woman who finally walks back into the place everyone else calls hell, and you’ll stay there.
You will wander the darkness until you know every inch of it. You will be unexpectedly good at winter. You will not be lonely alone.
You’ll bed down in an abandoned underworld, gutting fish from Styx and cooking them over the fire you make of the books bad boyfriends bought you. You’ll blaze the Bukowski, and fling the Fellini into Phlegethon. You’ll melt down your old wedding ring, and forge it into a claw.
an excellent girlpower story whose message may not be the most original or revolutionary, but a lesson in self-worth is never unwelcome because love fucking hurts sometimes, even to goddesses.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2020/01/23/a-girl…
read my book reviews on goodreads
