In Haynes’s telling the Olympian gods are spiteful, silly and self-centred. Haynes is not the first interpreter to see them that way, but she may be the wittiest ... Haynes left standup comedy when she realised she preferred tragedy. The dichotomy is a false one. Comedy can break your heart, while tragedy is intensified by a wise-cracking grave-digger ... With this, her third novel based on ancient myth, she has found a way of using all her classical erudition and her vivid sense of the ambiguous potency of the ancient stories, while being simultaneously very, very funny.
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