"Wearing the Lion" by John Wiswell

I admire John Wiswell for having the courage to try this. And the book was well written. But it wasn’t for me, and I gave up halfway through.

No spoilers in this review that aren’t on the back of the book, which is Greek myth anyway.

The idea of a pacifist retelling of the Twelve Labors of Heracles is a good one. Heracles needs to bring the hide of the Nemean Lion to King Eurystheus? Well, nowhere does it say that Heracles can’t bring the rest of the Nemean Lion along with the hide, sooooo….

That part was good. It was fun and it was funny.

The problem, and why I give Wiswell the guts for tackling this in the first place, is why Heracles undertook the Twelve Labors in the first place. Wiswell stuck to the mythology here: Hera had sent a Fury to drive Heracles mad, and in his madness he slew his children. The Twelve Labors were his atonement for that.

Obviously there’s a tonal clash between that and a fairly lighthearted take on the Labors. That was a problem.

The much bigger problem here is Hera.

In this telling, Heracles, ironically, is a devoted worshipper of Hera. The book alternates between Heracles’ internal monologue, which is almost entirely epistolary in the form of prayers to his chosen goddess, “Auntie Hera.” The other chapters are Hera’s.

Hera could, if spun right, have been a very sympathetic character. The first line of the book mentioning “my dipshit husband” made me laugh out loud. She’s more or less the epitome of the Woman Wronged, with Zeus out impregnating half the Hellenic world all the time. But, as in Greek myth, Hera can be furious at her husband all she wants but she can’t do anything to him; he’s the immortal lord of the Olympians. So rather than rage impotently, her anger gets channeled towards the most prominent reminder of Zeus’ infidelity: his son Heracles.

But like literally every child ever born, Heracles is completely innocent of the circumstances of his conception. The fact that he is sincerely devoted to Hera (who hates his devotions) makes it worse. And then when Hera, goddess of home and family, kills his children (even though it wasn’t her intention) … that’s a swan dive right over the moral event horizon.

Maybe it could have been salvaged, if Hera set out to atone in some way. Instead, for the rest of her chapters (which is literally every alternate chapter) we get Hera mostly squirming mentally and trying not to think about what she did.