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Book Reviewed by:
Elisabeth Cook
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An electric contemporary reimagining of the myth of Persephone and Demeter set over the course of one summer on a lush private island, about addiction and sex, family and independence, and who holds the power in a modern underworld.
Camp counselor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job (and an NDA), Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she's in charge. Her mother, Emer, head of a teetering agricultural NGO, senses otherwise. With her daughter seemingly vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help she alone is convinced she hears.
Alternating between the two women's perspectives, Rachel Lyon's Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America's own late capitalist mythos. Lyon's reinvention of Persephone and Demeter's story makes for a haunting and ecstatic novel that vibrates with lush abandon. Readers will not soon forget it.
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Considering how much time we spend with Emer, the combination of her self-effacement and sanctimonious attitude could become grating, but Lyon's exquisite, deft language, endlessly clever but never just for cleverness's sake, carries the character in her desperation. As Fruit of the Dead is a retelling of Greek mythology — the story of the harvest goddess Demeter, whose daughter Persephone is kidnapped by the god of the underworld, Hades — Emer's qualities serve a purpose. Rolo and Emer are markedly different in their relationships to Cory, but flipsides of the same capitalist coin, effectively both deities of the modern world, beings who control the lives of others...continued
Full Review
(926 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Rachel Lyon's novel Fruit of the Dead is based on the story of Demeter and Persephone from Greek mythology. In the original story, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, is devastated when her daughter Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld, who intends to make her his wife. Demeter's grief is so great that it affects the growth of crops and plants in nature. She appeals to the god Zeus, who asks Hades to let Persephone go. Hades agrees to this on the condition that Persephone hasn't eaten any of the food he has given her, but Persephone has (wouldn't you know it) eaten seeds from a pomegranate. As a compromise, Zeus and Hades decide that she will stay in the underworld for one-third of the year, and that she can return to Earth ...
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