Today's paid rec is a glorious mess...
BogiReads brings you the daily speculative reading recommendation of editor Bogi Takács.
Today's recommendation -
Today's novella is a mythical story retold with music majors in college and an epic amount of spite!
Author: Jordan Kurella
Title: I Never Liked You Anyway
Venue: Vernacular Books, 2022; Lethe Press, 2023
Type: Novella – not sure of the wordcount, I read it in print
Themes: Contemporary fantasy, mythic fiction, retelling, Greek mythology, college, music, messed up relationships
Where to read: Buy on Amazon US / Bookshop.org (associate links)
Disclosure: I bought it with my own money
I for some reason thought this novella was a 2023 release, but apparently it already came out in 2022 from a different press – I don’t know what happened there.
I wouldn’t miss it because of the rocky publication history, this is one of the best novellas I’ve read in recent memory. It’s an Orpheus and Eurydice retelling, except they are college students majoring in music. I’m honestly tired of Greek mythology retellings from American authors – interestingly this one has a blurb from a Greek author, I noticed – but this novella is fresh and exciting. It has a lot of the smaller mythological details, but it also has the college-students-musical-subcultures angle done perfectly. Often authors write these aspects not from experience, and it shows. Here it was very different and a joy to read, even when characters engaged in the messiest relationship combinations, ended up in Hades, and so on.
The chapters set in Hades are just as fun (er, fun isn’t the right word… terrible, but in a cool way?) as in the overworld, with Eurydice training in Hades to haunt Orpheus especially effectively. (It’s not going well.) There’s a glorious pissed-offness to this book – the title indicates well what it’s like – and I wanted every moment of it. Put on your tattered leather jacket and go!
Wishing you a good weekend,
Bogi.