Bard Bloom's Reviews > The Dark Wife

The Dark Wife, by Sarah Diemer, is a lesbian separatist reformulation of the Persephone myth.

Now, I suppose that someone could do a *good* lesbian separatist reformulation of the Persephone myth, especially if they start out with the first nonstandardness of The Dark Wife, viz. that Hades is a woman. I've certainly read versions of the myth in which Persephone actively chooses Hades for one reason or another.

But The Dark Wife has some divergences from Greek mythology which I find blasphemous (as I am an active worshipper of Athena and Hermes in particular). I follow Roman law in this regard, of "let the gods avenge themselves". So I'm not going to complain on *religious* grounds that Diemer's Zeus is an all-powerful self-centered bully and effectively the source of all evil in the cosmos. Or that Diemer's Athene is a lesbian slut.

I *am* going to complain about literary flaws.

First, it's a rather tedious romance: love at first sight, with Hades being endlessly kind and sweet to the narrating Persephone. There are several ways to make a love story interesting or engaging. Diemer avoids them all.

A significant amount of the trouble in the story could have been avoided if the main characters would only talk to each other about the important things. In this case there is no logistical reason for them not to — they have days or months in which they could do so. And they obviously love and care about each other even before they admit it. So why withhold crucial information from each other? Sheesh.

"Zeus' lies": One of the premises of the book is that standard present-day Greek mythology is actually what has come to us about the doings of the gods. That's kind of interesting. Diemer uses that like a club: Zeus is constantly telling lies about people which are universally believed, and which become Greek mythology. At least he has some reasons to tell the lies: e.g., he attempts to manipulate the dead to rebel against Hades. (It is unclear on why the dead believe these lies, since they are in constant contact with Hades and should know what she is like, but they do.) (It is also unclear why supremely powerful Zeus bothers to sneak-attack Hades this way, rather than taking his usual power-attack approach.)

Persephone defeats Zeus in about three sentences. And takes down Olympus on the next page. Seriously. Diemer spends more text talking about the garden of metal flowers that Hades makes for Persephone than she does when Persephone takes down the most powerful god.

Pallas is a major character. That's cool — in standard mythology Pallas was Athena's childhood friend/foster-sister/sweetheart/something, but Athena killed her by mistake. Since The Dark Wife is set in the underworld, of course Pallas is *there*, and it's an excellent idea to have her be an important character. And she still is in in love with Athene. And there's a significant plotline about Pallas having Persephone try to deliver a message to Athene. And this plotline is dropped without a trace. Persephone gets a message for Athene, and … never delivers it, never sees Athene, nothing.

And half the book is Persephone swooning around in absolute delight or absolute despair for one or another minor reason. But I find lots of romances have that feature.

Anyways, one head of Cerberus out of five. Not recommended even if you like both lesbian separatist fiction and Greek mythology.