She tweets at excerpted from LORE OLYMPUS: Volume One by Rachel Smythe, copyright 2021 by Rachel Smythe. But anyone who's drawn into Smythe's world will appreciate its beauty and wit, and few will escape its seductive ambiguity.Įtelka Lehoczky has written about books for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times. Such topics may not be of particular interest to that many of Lore's millions of fans. The diverse, subtle ways Smythe reiterates her central question - which can be summed up as something like, "How have we changed in the past two millennia? How have we stayed the same?" - make this book a great read for anyone who's thought about the stubbornness of human nature and the resilience of classic tropes. Once she's tricked out in the barely-there dress Artemis finds to replace her toga, she bounces around like one of those nearly-naked women in LeRoy Neiman's old Playboy cartoons. With huge, innocent, heavily lined eyes and ridiculously bodacious curves, Persephone in particular looks like a mid-century male's fantasy of the ultimate submissive sex toy. It's a choice Smythe seems to have made in order to point out how retrograde today's skimpy fashions are. The sense of anachronism is particularly strong in Smythe's female characters, most of whom have absurdly exaggerated hourglass figures and dress in extremely revealing outfits and high heels.
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Another time, a god is seen reading an actual newspaper (the very notion!). At one point two gods call one another using corded phones. Sometimes she inserts deliberate anachronisms to remind the reader that this isn't just the modern world with gods in it, but a world that's both ancient and modern at once. Her faces seem to be inspired by an unlikely forebear: They have the yearning eyes and pointy noses of Jules Feiffer's people. Though she makes lavish use of all the showy visual effects that drawing apps put at artists' fingertips, she also uses shapes and images borrowed from cartoons created half a century ago. This agenda appears most clearly in the book's art. Guilt-ridden over what he did to Persephone, Eros shows up at her and Artemis' apartment with "apology donuts." When Hermes and cool-guy Apollo stop by, the quartet play a board game and heat up dinner in a Crock-Pot.ĭel Rey Hades and Hera in a scene from Lore Olympus.Īt the same time, though, Smythe wants her readers to reflect on how the antiquated values that have shaped social relations since the time of myth persist in our modern era. Some of Smythe's updates are about what you'd expect, like when she casts the brothers Zeus, Poseidon and Hades as club-hopping party boys and has Artemis describe Persephone's mom Demeter as a "helicopter." But many of Smythe's choices establish her characters as decidedly of the now. Lore's characters may be inspired by the original stories, but they act less like their millennia-old versions than like young people of today. (Later in the book Persephone is roofied, however, so readers sensitive to depictions of sexual assault should steer clear.) Instead, Aphrodite has Eros - a flighty guy with a shopping addiction - get Persephone drunk and hide the passed-out girl in the backseat of Hades' sports car. "You look like a relic." When the nymph Minthe wants to manipulate Hades, she ghosts his texts Hades, meanwhile, ignores texts from Persephone because they're headed "User Unknown." Most importantly, Smythe's Hades doesn't kidnap Persephone at all. "You can't wear that!" her friend Artemis tells her. The first time we see Persephone, she's planning to wear a toga-style robe to Zeus' big party. These gods play the same interpersonal games that dominate today's sexually frank, cell-phone-mediated social world. These gods play the same interpersonal games that dominate today's sexually frank, cell-phone-mediated social world.īut Smythe's take on classic myth is anything but hidebound. Smythe's take on classic myth is anything but hidebound.