Her emotional journey and growth from dutiful daughter into a confident, formidable Queen was really satisfying to watch, as was her fury and defiance regarding Zeus and Demeter’s plans for her future.

I most definitely recommend this book if you are looking for a unique original spin on the story of Hades and Persephone. Personally, I was taking a break from high-stakes epic fantasy and this was a refreshing, witty romance to read with none of the crudeness you'd get from adult novels. Persephone has way too much 'candy' in narrative terms and the plot does not offer her enough hardship to compensate.

It does explore some heavier topics and briefly mentions topics such as misogyny, sexual assault and the trauma of War, so I definitely suggest checking TWs beforehand. Ergo three stars because it was mostly quite readable and I'm not really the target audience for a lot of YA fantasy anymore. It was also clunky with phrases you'd expect to see on a modern teen drama or TikTok which considering the context was very jarring. I’m not certain what I expected from this Hades and Persephone retelling, but this was quite different from the many others I’ve read in the past.

It's from here where Persephone enters the Underworld, starts changing things and discovers the true Hades that the story started to go downhill for me. So in a bid to trick the other gods, Persephone and Hades form a mutually beneficial alliance that will ensure her future safety, whilst maintaining Hades’ notorious reputation.

The romance is perfectly paced, complementing rather than overriding the anxieties and expectations that both characters wrestle with throughout the book. Zeus sought to belittle his daughter, but jumping into hell gives Persephone the courage to finally stand up for herself. Her mother and father force marriage on her and instead she escapes from it by running to Hades The place and the king. For someone who has never read Greek Mythology before I was transported into a new and imaginative world.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. I think this book was supposed to be about female empowerment and all the 'down with the patriarchy' sort of things, but I personally just find it hard to relate to problems such as having men lining up to court me, let alone men who are so gorgoeus, no beauty as such existed before. However it's also a pretty intelligent look at power, the desire for it and what it costs to be truly free.This was definitely one way to solve the age-gap issue and a unique take on the timeless story of the birth of the Olympians. I adored how fearless Fitzgerald was in creating a whole new profile for Hades and think she succeeded in bringing him to life in such a believable way. Girl, Goddess, Queen takes Hades and Persephone's tale and creates the ultimate rom-com drama with Persephone's growth and journey at its heart. But as much as this is a story of a girl downtrodden by her father and smothered by her mother, and how she rises above the confines they put upon her, it’s also a tale of, as Fitzgerald says, “unpacking the ways patriarchy hurts boys” too.