To break a curse that hangs twelve maidens each year, a resurrected girl and a runaway princess hunt a way to end the gods' cruelty.
- Score
- 76.4
- Spice
- 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️Sweet
- POV
- multi
- Ending
- HEA / HFN
Tropes
Content warnings
Curated signals, not an exhaustive guarantee.
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What readers think
Readers consistently praise Underwood's lyrical, poetic prose and the novel's bold sapphic and feminist heart—the Melantho and Leto dynamic is widely considered the emotional core and a highlight. The mythological premise rooted in the Odyssey's erased women is seen as genuinely fresh and resonant. The most common criticism is uneven pacing: the middle section is widely noted to drag, and some readers feel character stakes and urgency are undercut by the slow build. A minority find the love triangle underdeveloped and wish for deeper plot momentum alongside the romance. The bittersweet, tragic ending divides readers—some find it thematically perfect, others find it unsatisfying.
Read it if
- · Readers who love sapphic romances set in lush mythological worlds
- · Fans of feminist retellings that centre erased or silenced women from classical stories
- · Those who prioritise gorgeous prose and emotional character arcs over plot momentum
Skip it if
- · You need fast pacing and high plot momentum throughout
- · You prefer explicit or 'spicy' romance—this is firmly YA-level closed-door
- · Tragic or bittersweet endings are a dealbreaker for you
If you liked this
- · For fans of Madeline Miller's Circe—Greek mythology recentred on women, lyrical and emotionally devastating
- · Like A Song of Wraiths and Ruin but with a sapphic core and a tighter mythological scope
- · For readers of Jennifer Saint's Ariadne who want queerness and revenge woven into the retelling
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