Book 96: "Gods Behaving Badly" by Marie Phillips
Monday, December 15th, 2008 12:13![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeMost of the Greek Gods have been based in London since 1665, when they bought a large house cheap as the plague had lowered house prices. Most of the family still share the same house, although it is overcrowded and they are forever squabbling and getting on each other's nerves. The Underworld is a dull and changeless place, in which a talent for Scrabble is likely to come in useful in staving off boredom, but Persephone has got used to living there, and is coming back to the London house later and later each spring, as sharing a room with her sisters in the dirty and decrepit old house is just not the same as living in a palace!
The Gods act like Gods, being just as petty, jealous, and vengeful as they were thousands of years ago. They still have their individual roles to play in running the world, with Apollo making sure that the sun comes up each day and Ares keeping an eye on wars all around the world, but they are hampered by the waning of their powers, with Artemis being especially worried as both chastity and hunting seem to have gone out of fashion. But when Aphrodite gets her revenge on Apollo for a slight by making him fall in love with a mortal woman called Alice, and then manoeuvres Artemis into hiring Alice as the family's cleaner, it acts as a catalyst for change.
The story starts with Artemis having a chat with a tree in the local park which wasn't there yesterday, and discovering that it is a woman called Kate who has been turned into a tree by Apollo for rejecting his advances, and I was hooked from the first chapter.
The Gods act like Gods, being just as petty, jealous, and vengeful as they were thousands of years ago. They still have their individual roles to play in running the world, with Apollo making sure that the sun comes up each day and Ares keeping an eye on wars all around the world, but they are hampered by the waning of their powers, with Artemis being especially worried as both chastity and hunting seem to have gone out of fashion. But when Aphrodite gets her revenge on Apollo for a slight by making him fall in love with a mortal woman called Alice, and then manoeuvres Artemis into hiring Alice as the family's cleaner, it acts as a catalyst for change.
The story starts with Artemis having a chat with a tree in the local park which wasn't there yesterday, and discovering that it is a woman called Kate who has been turned into a tree by Apollo for rejecting his advances, and I was hooked from the first chapter.
