Mortals and Immortals of Greek Mythology

**Copy provided for free by netgalley in exchange of honest review/ #MortalsAndImmortalsOfGreekMythology #NetGalley**

Book Synopsis:

In Greek myths, extraordinary men and women are distinguished from other mortals: they are the heroes. Sometimes helped by the gods and sometimes hindered, they perform extraordinary exploits of strength, bravery, or intelligence. Jason, Theseus, Helen, Achilles, and Atalanta are among these mythical figures. The stories of the Greek mortals and immortals, and their legendary exploits, tower as tall now as they have for thousands of years! Alternately rivals or allies, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, Artemis, Apollo, and Dionysus form a restless family, which Zeus sometimes has trouble appeasing. But the king of the gods is far from irreproachable himself! Join these twelve gods at the top of Olympus, where they will give you all their secrets, even the most incredible ones. Never have these classic stories of Greek gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, been so sumptuously illustrated. All your favorites are here, but this beautiful art and design will make you want to learn their stories all over again.

My thoughts:

I love the Greek Gods myths. I can remember being 10 years old and begging my mama to let me check the myths out from the library and her saying I was too young to read such things. So I waited. I waited until the next time I was there by myself and I checked them out then. And then I fell into the world of the Gods where I haven’t wanted to leave ever since. Side note: I actually thought about getting a Classic degree in college but decided against it cause I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach and there isn’t a lot else to do with it other than that. Yeah that’s how much I love these myths.

I’ve read A LOT of different myth stories in my years. Some were dry, some were colorful in language and some were just plain fluff. This book was colorful in pictures and I really enjoyed it! The illustrations were whimsical yet had ties to original Greek art. The stories were lukewarm in content meaning that while Zeus was a horndog as always, he wasn’t the rapist bastard that he always is. I did have one complaint but it’s kinda minor. Hades only made a brief appearance and of course it was because of Persephone and Demeter, the poster children of codependent personalities. I don’t know if it’s cause I love this myth or cause I am salty that they left Hades out of the lineup but I didn’t really like Demeter’s section of the book. I will swear until the cows come home that that girl loves the 6 months she spends away from her mama in the underworld. It’s probably the only peace she gets from her harpy of a mother. Plus he’s dark and broody and I love those men.

So. Yeah. This was a cute book. I’m thinking of adding it to my Amazon wishlist that I’ve created for my nieces. These are books that I’ve read and loved and so I want to introduce them to my loves once they are older.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of 5 stars:

Into the Drowning Deep-Mira Grant

So. *ahem* I suck. *sighs* Yeah, this last few weeks has been rough. I have just been so unmotivated. But I’m gonna do this now. So here goes.

I read Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant this week. I love Ms. Grant by the way. She’s one of my favorite authors and her books never fail to make you smile, cry, and cringe in terror. And Into the Drowning Deep did not disappoint. Her series Newsflesh is one that made me question everything I ever knew about zombies. If you haven’t read those, I definitely recommend them as they bring a unique view to zombies and apocalyptic end times that I think is wonderful.

In this book, Ms. Grant takes on the ocean and some of its amazing mysteries. In the book, we follow different characters as they take a cruise thru the Marianas Trench in search to the age old question: do mermaids exist?. Imagine Entertainment needs ratings. They NEED to find out that something legend is fact. So they create a mockumentary in search for the elusive myth of women who have tails instead of legs, who sing instead of speak and who lure sailors to their deaths for fun. In truth, this is the second cruise that was taken for discovery. The first crew didn’t make it back unfortunately.  That’s why it’s so important that they discover something this time. Their reputation is in tatters and instead of finding mermaids, the network was accused of creating a hoax in the name of good television. So this trip is imperative to bringing them back to being a legitimate network.

That is the simplified version of what this book is about. But in actuality, it’s so much more. Tory is the sister of one of the original cruise who disappeared all those years ago and she’s made it her life’s work to locate those bitches who pulled her sister to her death. I mean it. She legit became a marine biologist to be able to find those monsters who dragged her sister to a watery grave. She signs up for the second cruise and while out at sea, the monsters attack. Instead of beautiful women who have nice racks and flippy tails, they find sharp-teethed beings that are a lot smarter than most people think.

I have a confession to make. Again. I am not really a mermaid fan. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love seeing pictures of mermaids. I have watched The Little Mermaid but I’m not really an Ariel fan. I’ve been to the ocean since I live in South Carolina and it doesn’t really hold an appeal to me. But I loved the sirens in this book. They were bad-ass and they knew how to really wreck up a body count. Tory was one of my favorites of the book, as well as Dr. Jillian who was along for the ride to prove that her job as a sirenologist was actually not a waste of student loans. It was very suspenseful and kept me completely entertained.

 out of 5 stars

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Ahhh, Wednesdays. Otherwise known as the gateway to the weekend. Yes, I know I still have two working days. Don’t rain on my parade here. I’m trying to talk myself into the fact that I only have two more days until the weekend.

Anyway, today was a good day book wise. I read Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire. Its the third book in the Wayward Children series and I’m in love. If you haven’t read this series yet, you need to. It really is great. There is action, adventure, and while the books are a little bit sad in that the children are searching for a home, its still heartwarming.

Like I said, this is the third book of the series. I wouldn’t recommend trying to read this one before the others but you could do it if you had to. The book focuses around returning characters such as Christopher and Kade but also adds new people like Cora and Nadja. If you don’t know the series, it focuses on children who are a little different. They have all experienced other worlds by going thru a door. Some go to fairy lands, other go to Logic lands, where everything makes sense, and some go to worlds where they fall in love with skeleton princesses. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which character is which and which one mostly relates to you.

Cora is the one I loved the most. She was me, twenty years ago. Cora and I share the same body type. We both have dealt with body image problems and while I’ve learned after 36 years to live with the body given, Cora is still in that teenage phase where other people’s opinion actually mean something to her.

Cora had been fat her entire life. She had been a fat baby, and a fat toddler in swim classes, and a fat child in elementary school. Day after day, she had learned that “fat” was another way to say “worthless, ugly, waste of space, unwanted, disgusting”. She had learned to believe them by the time she was in the third grade, because what else was she supposed to do?

Cora came to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children by way of the Trenches. She went to the Trenches where she became a mermaid who helped save the land. However, she was pushed back out the world by a random tide. When she wouldn’t stop telling the story of her time way, they packed her off to the home. She is only there a few months when a young naked girl tumbles out the sky, pulling the kids on a quest to save another world.

I love these books. They are never long enough in my humble opinion. I want more from each world, where I get sucked into a fairy tale land where it might not be perfect but its perfect for them. And I would have loved to have these books when I was younger, dreaming of a worlds that would take me from the one I lived in where I felt like an outsider no matter what I did. Ms. McGuire proves once again she is the queen of fairytales with this addition.

5 out of 5 stars.

Uprooted by Naomi Novak

I have a confession to make. I’m a huge sucker. I’m a girl who loves a good story about the impossible. Give me a story about dragons, unicorns, witches, you name it, I’ll eat it up. I think it’s that kid in me that loved watching Star Trek: The Next Generation or seaQuest DSV wanting to escape into another world. Side note: if you have not watched seaQuest, you need to. It’s got talking dolphins, underwater adventures and Jonathon Brandis, AKA, my teenage crush.

I’ve cut my teeth on magic missions from Harry and Hermione to Frodo and Sam to Quintin and Julia and loved every new world that I’ve stumbled across. When I was younger I liked my fantasy with more than a hint of romance that contained a damsel in distress that needed saving. Now, older and wiser, I like my fantasies with a kickass heroine who can save her damn self and her so called hero.

Looking for those kind of stories is how I stumbled on Uprooted. I picked it up on a whim. I hadn’t really heard a lot about it but it kept popping up every time I pulled up Amazon saying that I would love it. And the gods of Amazon were not wrong! I did love it and the world that Ms. Novak created.

The book follows Agnieszka, a young girl in a faraway village. She is just one of many girls in this poor village who is facing an unclear future, one filled with uncertainty and fear. And while you might be thinking ‘well it sounds like it’s set in the medieval ages and everybody always dies’, you wouldn’t be wrong. But Agnieszka has bigger fish to fry than worrying about the Black Plague or childbirth. She and the other girls are facing the probability of being chosen to be taken by the Dragon.

It seems that every 10 years, the Dragon comes down from the tower he keeps in their Valley and takes the girl. He does this as exchange of payment for keeping the valley mostly from harm from The Wood. He takes the girl back to this tower to keep for a decade during which time they are never seen. That is until the decade is over and they return to their village, changed. It’s time for Agnieszka to stand in front of the Dragon and allow him to chose the girl. She’s sure that he will chose her best friend, Kasia, because Kasia is gorgeous, always well put together and has many skills of how to take care of a man. *wink wink* You know what I’m talking about.

But anyway, Agnieszka, as well as all the others in the village, does not realize that beauty is the least of the Dragon’s wants in the girl he chooses. He wants a companion and someone who will help him battle the Wood. And this time he think Agnieszka will be the help he needs.

What follows is a magical adventure that pits Agnieszka and the Dragon against the Wood as well as themselves. They are an unlikely pair but one drawn together by a common goal of saving the valley from the evil that lives in the Wood. The adventure sucks you in this book and you can see the fire-heart potion fighting the trees, burning everything it touches while the pair try to control the magic swarming within them. The first paragraph of the book was enough to make me grab it off the shelf, clutch it close to my chest and hurry to the cash register.

“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.”

Like, oh my goodness! How awesome is that?!?! Ms. Novak created a story that brings to mind Grimm’s Fairy Tales or ancient hero stories with overgrown monsters with a clear view of who the villain is. And in a world where sometimes it hard to see who is the villain of your life, it’s good to see that good can still do battle with evil, fighting for the world. I loved Agnieszka and how much of a spitfire she was. She may have been taken by the Dragon but she wasn’t going to let him get the last word no matter what. Also she was constantly getting dirty or her hair was out of place and I can relate to that completely!

I am giving this 4 out of 5 stars mainly because I listened the audiobook along with reading and I HATED the audio. I swear the reader had the worst accent, which I was under the impression was faked but after further research discovered was just her own terrible voice. So unless you like trying to understand what word was just said, I’d steer clear of it. Plus the cover for the book is gorgeous so go with that instead.