Divine Beings Are Down and Out in NYC in Winter of the Gods
No one ever said dating the Goddess of the Hunt was going to be easy. Even in her diminished state, some thousands of years after the Greek Pantheon tumbled from Mount Olympus, she’s a force to be reckoned with: a woman of perpetual virginity, with a vengeance toward those who wrong womankind. But this is where classics professor Theo Schultz finds himself at the opening of Winter of the Gods, Jordanna Max Brodsky’s followup to last year’s Greek gods in New York debut The Immortals: enacting a chaste affair with Selene DiSilva, the fallen goddess formerly known as Artemis.
Theo and Selene met during the events of the first book, when Selene tapped Theo for his classical mythology knowledge after ritual murders began occurring all over NYC, crimes tied to the rituals of fading Greek antiquity. Selene may have been a goddess, but her millennia-long memory has some holes. As an expert in things mythological, Theo was more than happily sucked into the complex, never-ending family feud.
Now, Theo and Selene return in another winning combination of gritty crime procedural and intellectually stimulating urban fantasy. The murdered body of Hades is found stretched out upon the famous Charging Bull Statue in Bowling Green Park in a manner echoing the earlier ritual killings. But something isn’t quite right: Selene takes off after a suspect, a mere mortal, and is stunned when he dons the sigil of Hermes and flies off into the night. Selene and her far-flung family haven’t had access to their artefacts of power for centuries—the rise of Christianity and modernity having sapped their powers—and certainly no regular human should be able to wield the arrows of Apollo, or any other godly item. Someone is messing with the very structure of their godhood.
Theo and Selene travel around the New York area trying to bring together family members to aide her in her quest to find the killer. (She’s the Goddess of the Hunt, after all.) But things hardly proceed smoothly for the young (and not so young) lovers. Theo is our entrance point into the modern lives of the gods, and though they are diminished by our modern world, they are what they are: prickly, oversized personalities, often servants to their archetypes. Theo is enthusiastic, an expert in his own right, but he’s often dismissed by beings who aren’t used to treating mortals as anything but toys. He doesn’t appreciate it when he is told to wait in the car, and I can’t blame him for a minute.
Selene continues to be a complex character, one who feels the conflict between her Olympian role, and her more human aspirations. She and Theo enact a strange romance: bounded by what she sees as her duty, and her true desire. Her intercession in the lives of battered women continues to be fraught: on the one hand, she isn’t above laying down serious hurt on men who are violent towards women. (It’s intensely satisfying reading about a domestic abuser getting attacked by zoo animals.) At the same time, she doesn’t have a lot of compassion towards the women she’s ostensibly helping, deriding in them what she perceives as weakness. I don’t think anyone has ever accused the Greek gods of an overabundance of compassion, so maybe her callousness maybe isn’t a huge surprise. Still, it unnerves Theo at points. As I noted: dating a goddess ain’t easy.
Winter of the Gods introduces a number of new characters—Hephaestus (known now as Flint), the son of Ares and Aphrodite—and touches base with humans and divine beings we first met in The Immortals. But among the most important characters is, again, New York City itself: its moods and environs, its people and places. The original Greek pantheon was tied to real locations—the cloud-covered heights of Mount Olympus, where the gods lived; the island of Delos, where Apollo and Artemis were born—so it only makes sense that, here and now, they would root themselves in our vital human geography. Yes, it’s true, the gods are capricious and self-centered, more worried about their own skins than our fleeting mortal lives. But they also live where we live, and love where we love. They’re the imperfect bastions of our rough humanity, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Winter of the Gods is available now.