The Palace of Eros

The Palace of Eros Caro De Robertis, 2024 Premise: A retelling of Psyche and Eros, blending ancient myth with fluid gender and sexuality. A fascinating book, which I enjoyed a lot, but didn't completely love. The writing is very poetic and languid, which isn't for everyone. It drags in the middle, but the ending is fairly lovely. This mythological romance-adjacent novel mostly follows Psyche, who is at first much like her traditional counterpart - she is impossibly lovely and universally sought after, which eventually raises the ire of Aphrodite. Of course, this book explores how she feels about all of this - the loss of her connection with her sisters as her beauty sets her apart, the feeling of being unpleasantly talked about and watched for nothing that she'd done. Eros receives less internal examination through much of the book, but is where the story most diverges from the original. Eros is explicitly and supernaturally nonbinary; she/he/they (mostly uses she in the ...