Picked this up on the clearance table of Barnes and Nobles, maybe a year ago.

I'll admit it, I picked up this book due to the rather interesting graphic art on the cover and because of the title. I was even more intrigued when I read the author had won awards for their short stories and this was their first attempt at a full novel.

Overall, I think What was successful. The story felt a bit jumbled at first but then ended very nice (with me crying to boot!). For anyone who has seen the movie 'Love Actually' this book was written along the same lines; a group of characters all living their separate story lines end up meeting in the very end in a single conclusion.

Generally this book is about Zeus and Hera, the Greek King and Queen gods, who have managed to make their way to present time New York City. They separated at some earlier point in history and watched as their contemporaries slowly disappeared through time.

Hera and Zeus have wandered through life separately only to randomly meet on a dating web site. Hera decides it's time to make Zeus jealous and attempts to seduce him, but accidentally ends up pregnant by other means. She manages to guilt Zeus into thinking it was his child but Zeus one-ups her by leaving before the birth.

The bulk of the book is about Hera's attempt to track down her wayward husband, the recovery of a former Zeus lover from her 2,500 year entrapment, the transfer of the duty of Oracle from the current generation to the next, and Zeus's attempt to reignite his place as King of the Gods.

While this book features the two gods as the main characters they are not the heroes. While there is no definitive 'villain' the Gods occupy the dark end of the gray spectrum. This book has a wide range of personalities and characters and I found the juxtaposition with the 'sophisticated' Gods to be very interesting. The reader will find it hard to have sympathy for either Zeus or Hera - both are greedy and selfish. The author took the flaws of both Gods from Greek mythology to the extreme and made them almost despicable. This was my first time reading a book where the main characters are not sympathetic - and it was an interesting experience.

The only hangup with this book was that at time it felt like the descriptions were longer and more repetitive then necessary. The author would describe certain characters multiple times with similar language, hammering home really easy to grasp concepts to the point where the horse's skin was falling off. I fault poor editing and because this was the first outing for the author. It appears she has stuck to short stories since then.

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Attempted to release this book in Athens near the Acropolis but the security was very tight due to swarms of cruise passengers. As a result, I ended up releasing this book at the overlook for the Fort near the Rome cruise port.