Thursday, September 10, 2020

Ten top goddesses in fiction

E. Foley and B. Coates are writers and editors based in London. They are the authors of the number-one bestseller, Homework for Grown-ups: Everything You Learnt at School and Promptly Forgot, as well as Advanced Homework for Grown-ups, The Homework for Grown-ups Quiz Book and Shakespeare for Grown-ups, and What Would Boudicca Do?: Life Lessons from History's Most Remarkable Women. Their latest book is You Goddess! Lessons in Being Legendary from Awesome Immortals.

At the Guardian, they tagged ten "brilliantly varied examples of how goddesses have been approached in fiction, sometimes revelling in the divine spotlight and sometimes in more background roles." One title on their list:
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

This is a joyfully comic modern-day novel where several Olympian gods and goddesses are now living in Hampstead (Aphrodite works on a sex chatline and Artemis is a dog-walker). When they tangle with mortals Neil and Alice things go awry, as they often do when deities and humans mix. Neil has to use Angel tube to get into the underworld to save Alice, and sort out a problem caused by the Greek gods’ famously predatory attitude towards women.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Gods Behaving Badly is among Mary Norris's twelve notable books on Greece, by Greeks and philhellenes.

The Page 69 Test: Gods Behaving Badly.

--Marshal Zeringue