A review by btaylorb
Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

 I feel like there are a lot of recent retellings of the Persephone mythos that glorify her relationship with Hades as a romantic one, and this book stands out from that crowd as one that focuses on the mother-daughter relationship of Demeter and Persephone. 

The complicated mother-daughter dynamic goes hard. The shifting POVs of first-person past tense for Emer (i.e., Demeter) and a third-person present tense for Cory, (Persephone) is jarring at first but also is really successful at illuminating the differing levels of vocal power versus embodied presence in their narratives. Emer uses her own voice to narrate her story but she's reflecting on her actions from after the fact with an oftentimes detached outlook. Meanwhile Cory is denied her own voice for her own story, with a narration style that almost seems to float above her like an astral projection observing the actions of its living body, and yet her sensory experiences are immediate, in the moment and intense.

Poetic, lush, but also gritty and gray. Check your content warnings, but also: The potentially triggering scenes are handled with care and skillful language. Because we know the story, we know what to expect to a certain degree, and the difficult to read parts are not there for fun, or for edginess. This version of the Persephone story highlights some of its darkest parts.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Drug abuse and Drug use

Moderate: Rape, Sexual violence, and Toxic relationship

There are two instances of sexual assault. One occurs at the beginning, but it is an antecedent event that is more implied than described outright, and the focus is less on the assault and more on the moment when Cory tells her mother and how her mother reacts. It's meant to establish some of the complexity of the mother/daughter relationship in how the mother fails to aid her daughter. The second instance receives slightly more descriptive attention, but it's brief and, for anyone familiar with the source material, it should not be totally unexpected. It was still difficult to read. It's the one part of the book that I have complicated feelings over; it's definitely not written to be sexy or titillating in any way.