They take a stand against bullying, misogyny, complicity, and rape culture. While falling in love (they don’t seem to make an issue of being related though Hades knows of this connection before she reveals it to her niece), Persephone and Hades also endure smear campaigns and risk shunning in order to take down the kingpin. What starts as an escape from Zeus’ escalating machinations, transforms into a greater mission to dissemble his aggressive and destructive hold on humanity and the gods/goddesses. In The Dark Wife, author Sarah Diemer recasts the Grecian myth of Persephone, goddess of Spring and Rebirth, and Hades, ruler of the underworld, from abduction and forced marriage to a kick ass romance. In a desperate bid for freedom, the young goddess and nymph hatch a plan to runaway. The most fraught moment of her life is learning that she has to move to Olympus and leave everything she loves behind. Elsewhere in the world, gated away in her mother Demeter’s earthly paradise, the Immortals Forest, Persephone frolics and dreams with her girlfriend, a nymph named Charis. Fear undercuts the bacchanalian veneer of the ancient Greek pantheon. The administration on Olympus controls the flow and shape of information.

Welcome to the world of “alternative facts”. Here it is, or as close as I can tell it. I am Persephone, and my story must begin with the truth. And none of it is true, or is so fragmented that the truth is nothing more than a shadow, malformed. Forever I will be known as the girl who was stolen away to be the wife of Hades, lord of all the dead. The stories told by fires, the myth of my kidnap and my rape, are all that remain of me. I have forfeited my inheritance, my birthright.

The Dark Wife by Sarah Diemer