I have loved De Robertis since reading Cantoras years ago. It was a favorite of mine from that year (2020), and remains a favorite to this day. Between that and my established love for mythology and retellings, especially queer ones (which this was, to the utmost), reading this was a forgone conclusion.  

 

This is, of course, a retelling of the myth of Psyche and Eros. Psyche is a gorgeous mortal woman who has captured the eye and imagination of so many that Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, feels threatened. She dispatches her child, Eros, to take care of the problem. But the sight of Psyche captures Eros as well. So, she defies her mother and spirits Psyche away (under some very false pretenses) to a castle she creates specifically for the purpose of keeping her secret (and therefore safe), from everyone (Olympus and the rest of the world included). To maintain the safety in the secrecy, the two can only meet and come together under the cover of darkness...during which visits they explore each other, with deep passion, and fall in love. What starts as bliss slowly becomes confused for Psyche, who questions the need for the secrecy, the dark, the one-sided sharing, if this is actually the "freedom" Eros promises it to be. And so, she makes a choice that breaks the spell. Once thrust into the "real" world, Psyche and Eros must fight, introspectively and externally, for their love to survive in the light of day. It may be a harsher light, but if they can do it, they may also help remake the (order of the) world.   

 

Y'all. The writing. On a sentence level, de Robertis’ writing is perfection. They capture the essence - pure and clear - of everything they describe. It’s evocative and stunning. The words themselves are emotion. In particular, in the moments of coming together for Eros and Psyche, the writing is as sensual as the acts and stories it tells, it caresses the reader as they caress each other. My goddess. Across the reading experience, it was a very literal effort not to highlight every line. And you'll see how close I came to reproducing the entire novel when you get to the end of this review and peek at how many pull quotes I have. 

 

It should really come as no surprise, if you know anything of De Robertis' other writing (and life), that gender and sexuality were deeply explored in these pages. And that, too, was done spectacularly. First, since I already mentioned the way these scenes were written, the sexual discovery and awakening is so pure. In the unsure aspects of that, there is a parable for queer sexual awakening especially that is incredibly tender. If only all sexuality could be seen this way, as natural and celebrated, as want free from shame. The costs and pleasures of caving to one’s own wants, bucking those socially accepted truths about shame - and the patience and care it takes to create a space enough safe to allow a person to feel able to voice those wants and buck those truths - is gorgeous within these pages. And I appreciated the complexity of learning on both sides, from Eros' place of power and Psyche's place of newness of perspective, to make this happen in a way that felt right, with fullness of agency, for both. 

 

The play with gender and gendered language (through the possibility of metamorphosis in a god’s powers) was sharp and fine, and communicated with a lovely smoothness. It reminded me a bit of Wrath Goddess Sing, as far as purpose and vibes, but with (IMO) much higher quality writing and clarity of story. In a "traditional" - socially - sense, De Robertis really exposes the smallness of possibility and expectation in the life of a woman. It's almost a parable of a telling of monstrousness: the monstrousness of being a wife to a husband as reality versus the belief of monstrousness of being a wife to a wife. As a small piece of that discussion, the contradiction of something being wanted so much that the fight for a piece of it reduces its worth, is conveyed with gorgeously painful precision. 

 

The final major theme explored is the philosophy of what it means to see or know someone, past the basics of sight and name. And who defines that anyway? So very interesting. Honestly, the promise of what people could be, could become, if they weren’t afraid to show and embrace their full and deepest selves, but were instead encouraged to...the joy, the creativity, the comfort, the vitality that could BE, if one was free to belong only to themselves was affecting AF. 

 

The philosophy of sex and gender in this novel (flying in the face of the rigid and caged perspective of it that we popularly hold) is mystical and magical and tender and expansive. And the crushing and confused complexity of love and frustration, passion and betrayal, loyalty and a need for freedom is captured with such force; the words are propulsive. I haven't loved and been as literarily impressed by a retelling since Circe (and goodness knows there have been quite a few of them). It was just that good. Gahhhhhhhh. 

 

“In the rush of the river around me when I bathed there, a living aqueous body surrounding mine. In the way a tree could subsume me, swallow my shadow into its own like water poured to water, blending dark with dark, a recognition and a coming home. In the ease of sinking my body into the cool scope of a tree, oak or olive, fig or pine, blended into them, until I felt my roots deep in the earth below and my head green with leaves reaching greedily up to the sun. In the rich murmur of rain against our roof, spilling tales from the heavens, a wet weeping and laughter of secrets I longed to translate or swim into with my human mind. I could stay up all night listening to the language of the rain. I dreamed I could be rain, sky, river, tree. I dreamed I could be melted by my love for the world. Poured and blended. Lost, remade.” 

 

“The melodies flowed like a stream over dark stones. Sounds unmade of meaning, unclasped from thought or time. Sounds that carried what could not be spoken, soul to throat to ear to soul. I didn’t learn the songs, but they settled in me, deep inside me and yet absent at the same time.” (what words for that simultaneous intergenerational memory and loss) 

 

“But suitors are nothing like coins. Not at all. You can gather them endlessly and still find yourself with nothing.” 

 

“I did not yet understand all the curves and eddies of power, that you don’t have to steal from the powerful to incur their wrath. You don’t, in fact, have to do anything at all. You only need to be perceived as the cause of their discomfort. If the powerful feel something they do not want to feel, and they decide you are to blame, your fate is sealed.” 

 

“…for when a sorrow can’t be stopped, there is solace in giving it room.” 

 

“How could they look so easily on her when her fury was a lamp to sear the skies?” 

 

“…for only language takes the truth of who we’ve been and what we’ve lived and clasps it to the great necklace of time, keeps it from being forever lost. What can I say. That the hand against my hair was honey on a thirsty tongue. The glint and shudder of fish in a stream. Silk rippling through sunlight. I was sunlight, in the presence of her hand.” 

 

“I wrapped myself in a sound that draped its beauty around me and also slid right into me, for sound enters through the ear and seep directly into the mind, the bones. With sound she entered me and reached my core. There she hummed, vibrated. There she coaxed sleeping beasts to wake. I had not imagined before that sound could wash the soul the way water washed a body, but that was how it felt those early nights: that this mysterious woman’s music cleansed away the layers left by sadder days, washed the stains of old invasions, eased sorrows I didn’t know I had. I became lighter in the presence of her song.” 

 

"I could not disengage the threads of my curiosity and desire. They twined into a top so fierce it took my breath away. I was taut with it.” 

 

“…what does that mean, what can you call this place, this thing she’s done to me with her mouth, a long kiss? A speaking? A kind of devouring dance? A mouth is a soft wet thing, is it not, how can it be so muscular, so absolute? Shame slipped away, sank into a hot blind sea.” 

 

“What happens with you is more living than I thought could ever be mine.” 

 

“I longed for so much that I almost longed for everything, which is a feeling so vast it curves in on itself, toward the start of the circle, where everything becomes nothing and the longing for everything blurs into longing for nothing, a subsuming in the longing itself, swallowing you whole.” 

 

“Words are power. When you speak what you know, or what you want or what you are, you give it power, more existence, more shape inside the texture of the world." 

 

“I was nothing, anything, colors in the water that the lightest leaf could rupture into brilliant shards the stream carried away.” 

 

“I paint her with my tongue. All the possible colors spring from its tip. My tongue creates. Gives birth to worlds. Her explosion in my mouth remakes the universe.” 

 

“The mind is where violence begins.” (not the body, not hands, not a phallus; none of those are innately violent - the violence they enact is born in the mind, a universally shared organ) 

 

“The border of male and female? […] It’s not such a deep border, after all. […] Or perhaps the border is a mountain range, the kind people declare impossible to cross, but whose ravines are full of green and secret life.” 

 

“Play and joy and searching. Ease and art and fluid truth. Body as lake. Body as sky. Body as wind and flow. The unscripted dance of what Eros knew could also be.” 

 

“So what if a free woman ruins pots or bowls or jugs? So what if some of her markings come out ugly or wrong? […] Because she is free, there is no one to tell her the pot or bowl or just is wrong. Or that she is wrong. Except her own self.” 

 

“The logic of the world was a metal she melted in the forge of her loving.” 

 

“And yet, even when we change, even when we find power inside us and lift it to the light, we still carry in us the wounded animal of our memory, the bruises and scars, the spurning. We want to be un-spurned. We want the ones who held mirrors for us, whether in solace or in mockery, to see us again with fresh, admiring eyes, as if this seeing could affirm us, mend the shattered parts, and make us whole. Those of us who’ve been broken have more shards inside us than we know – and who among us has not been broken, as women in this world?” 

 

“Desire leads to more desire. Existing leads to the will to exist. Boldness in the dark leads to boldness by day.” 

 

“Surely it was hubris of the worst kind to imagine that the shape of the world would change just because we brought our passion into the light. Absurd. And yet. And yet. If it was not so, why this fear?” 

 

“For that is the secret of beauty: it permeates a person, flows from them, in ways that transcend the human eye.” 

 

“Exhaustion crushed me. All I really wanted was a place, somewhere, somehow, in this world.”; 

 

“Gather the whispers of your future, insist yourself into the days to come.” 

 

“Why can’t the shape of things arise from within instead of being forced on us?” 

 

“Too much beauty is a burden. It endangers us. It always will, unless the worlds change.” 

 

“When old ways shatter, new paths can open.” 

 

“Whoever I was destined to become by the end of this day, and the ones that followed, I wanted to experience fully who I was in the now, in the hard-earned and far-flung now, to tattoo this moment into me so I could carry it into whatever came next.”