Item: Hera
Rating: 3
Author: Catherine

Hera by Jennifer Saint
Published by Flatiron Books
Publication date: August 13, 2024
Genres: Fiction, Fantasy

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Jennifer Saint’s new novel, Hera is novel about the queen of all Greek mythology. Or to be more precise, the long-suffering wife of king of the gods, Zeus. The novel opens when the Olympians defeat the Titans, the ancient gods who appeared out of Chaos to rule the world. Zeus and Hera are brother and sister and as they and their siblings gather to determine what comes next, Hera believes she will be given a role as important as his. Instead, he claims the heavens, giving Poseidon the seas and Hades the Underworld. He names himself king and tells Hera she can be queen and the goddess of matrimony by marrying him, because she’s one of the only women he’s never been able to seduce. Setting aside the total ick factor of incest, Hera feels she has no choice but to agree. If she refuses, he’ll just rape her and cast her out off Mount Olympus.

Things go as well as might be expected when an immortal female warrior is blindsided by the immortal male she helped to power. Saint chronicles Hera’s life in all its diminishing, vindictive, petty, tragic detail. Without the ability or the allies to wrest power from Zeus she is forced to take out her vengeance on the seemingly endless stream of mortal and immortal women he foists his attention on.

Ostensibly, Hera decides to work against him in secret, but every scheme, every plot she devises backfires and the only people who suffer from her wrath are goddesses and mortal women. Which is exactly how traditional mythology portrays her—a vengeful harpy who punishes victims because she can’t punish her husband. In addition, the novel covers the centuries from the victory of the Olympians all the way through the battle of Troy and its aftermath. That’s a lot of mythological history. The book is 400 pages and after the first 200 I felt every one of them.

This is an ambitious undertaking, one of Saint’s longer explorations of Greek mythological women. Previous novels like Elektra and Atalanta are retellings that relied on her ability to reinterpret established myths from a woman’s perspective, but that feat wasn’t visible in Hera. Rather, the book felt like a recitation of Zeus’ misdeeds and Hera’s botched attempts to make him pay until the end when a much larger theme is revealed. I appreciated the point Saint ultimately makes, but the execution took too long and left me disappointed by the novel overall.

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