[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

IAnd now I'm reading The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes. It looks like this is more like her excellent Stone Blind (about Medusa) than the rather dry Divine Might (info on the Greek Godesses).

I am having a little trouble with the timeline of the chapters, but each chapter is good.

Originally Posted by issybird

I have mixed reactions to Haynes's books. Like you, I enjoyed Stone Blind and didn't care for Divine Might; with the latter, it was mostly her trying far too hard to make it "relevant". My favorite book by her is Pandora's Jar which made my ten-best list in 2022.

So, that said, I abandoned Jocasta's Children. It just grated.

Spoiler:

Impossible to believe that Jocasta was shocked, shocked at the thought of marrying an old king. That was a totally modern note that didn't seem realistic. I loathed the nicknames for the children. And Haynes revamped the Oedipus myth to the extent that it was unrecognizable. Ugh.

I'll be interested to find out what you think.

I hated the split time period, in which the chapters ?alternated between two points in the story timeline. I hated the prologue, which introduced a character, though not by name, and a treatment which then gets ignored in the rest of the book.

I was also surprised that Jocasta was so surprised at the idea of marrying an older man.

But there were other major plot holes. Such as

Spoiler:

Jocasta's husband being unwilling/unable to has sex with her, supposedly because of his homosexuality, and yet he had fathered at least three children with a mistress.

It was OK as a retelling of Oedipus. I didn't even mind the plot changes (given that there's no definitive version). I hated the choice of how to tell it.

Next up: One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross by Harry Kemelman. The tenth in his Rabbi Small mystery series.