Melanie Dugan

Melanie Dugan's Dead Beautiful is a fresh take on a Greek myth that we all know and love. Mythology tells us that Persephone was conned into spending half the year with Hades, and thus the seasons were born. What if that wasn't the case though? What if, instead, Persephone went willingly to her new part-time home. Dugan's book explores the possibility that perhaps, rather than stealing her soul, Hades actually stole Persephone's heart.

Dead Beautiful is unique in that it is told in very short bursts. Each chapter is essentially a miniature interview with a different god or goddess who is related somehow to Persephone. Dugan' sets up a world where the gods are the head honchos. They are responsible to keep the earth running smoothly and, wouldn't you know it, some of them are just overworked. Who has time to pay attention to flighty teenagers (18 millennia is rather young) when you've got a whole world to run? This is the perfect set up for Persephone and Hades to build their story, and it works really well as a whole.

The one downside to telling the story this way is that it is all dialogue. Settings, events, and everything in between are built entirely through the words of the different entities being interviewed. In some cases, like for Persphone and Hades, this works great! These two have very distinct voices. Especially Persephone, as she's portrayed as the petulant teen most of the time. For others though, it gets really difficult to figure out who is speaking. If you're not a fan of reading the title of each chapter to know who is going to be telling the story, this might drive you crazy. Fair warning! What I loved most of all though was the new take on the relationship between Persephone and Hades. Who knew that Hades was actually such a sweet guy? Dead Beautiful shows that sometimes things are misconstrued.

As a whole this book is definitely a different, but intriguing, way of reworking mythology that has been around for centuries. Let's be honest, readers who are purists are most likely not going to like what Dugan has done with the myth. However if you're willing to go in as a blank slate, I think you'll find something to enjoy in Dead Beautiful. From Persephone's ranting, to Hades' scheming, there truly is a brand new story here to fall for.
… (meer)

What would drive a mother to leave her family without another word? And how does such an action permanently change her child? Does it really even matter why a beloved mother is gone, if she has gone of her own free will? Melanie Dugan's lyrical new novel, Bee Summers, explores this question, ways to recover from unexpected loss, and the unseen but always acknowledged scars left on a heart.

The summer that Lissy Singer is eleven, her mother walks out on Lissy and her father. At first, Lissy believes that her mother has just gone to a rally but as days pass without word, she then becomes convinced that her mother has cancer and wants to spare Lissy the pain of watching her suffer. Lissy cannot begin to conceive of what else would make her mother disappear so completely and so determinedly. As her mother's disappearance stretches on, Lissy spends her summer traveling around on her father's beekeeping route, unloading hives in orchards and then looping back again to retrieve them once the bees' job pollinating is finished. She meets and stays with the people on her father's route: Earl, an aging African American orchardist whose kindness and easy acceptance is immediately appealing; Chance, a famous author who is semi-reclusive but who helps nurture the spark of creativity in Lissy; and Opal and Les, a kindly woman and her ailing but abusive husband living on a rural farm. As Lissy meets each of these people on her father's route, she learns about life and the ways others live, layering experience after experience in her own life.

Lissy's mother doesn't return and she overhears whispers and gossip she doesn't quite understand in their small town. But as she grows up, alienated from the town, she holds her hurt at her abandonment close to her chest, never discussing it with anyone. Apart from her summer migrations with her comfortably silent father, she seems to live on the periphery, waiting for her own chance to escape the town. When she wins a scholarship to college, supplemented by a gift from her Aunt Hetty, she leaves for university and never looks back. Her volume of published poetry concentrated on the long ago wounds from her mother's leaving, telling her experience and the silence and pain surrounding it. But her version is only one version of her mother's disappearance, as she will eventually come to see.

Lissy as a character is lovely and heartbreaking. She is very smart and precocious but also softly naïve. Her worry that liking the manicure Opal takes her for means she is taking sides against her mother, who would not have approved, is wrenching. She very much wants her mother to return to her and doesn't want to do anything that could possibly prevent that. But she is curious and just a little bit open to the world her mother never knew and people her mother never met so she finds herself growing and changing anyway. The writing here is lush and the descriptions of the natural world are gorgeous. The pacing of the novel is languid, dizzy with the buzzing of bees and heavy with the sweet, hot scent of summers. The majority of the book takes place in the seven years before Lissy leaves for university but the quarter set during her settled adult life allows the reader to look back with her at those long past summers with more adult eyes and to see the ways in which they formed her, good and bad alike. This is a magnificent coming of age novel, a testimony to resilience and the uncovering of truth, even if it jars with memory, a perfect read for the long, lazy days of summer.… (meer)

Originally posted here and there's a giveaway open until July 3 if you follow that link.

Mythology, particularly Greek, has been one of my favorite subjects to read about since I was a child. When I was really young, I had a picture book full of myths. Then I graduated to chapter books. My love for the Greek gods and goddesses has never diminished. They call to my imagination so strongly, Zeus with his wandering eyes, understandably jealous Hera, clever and brutal Athena, terrifying Hades, and naive Persephone.

I especially love when an author can put a new spin on one of these old tales. Dugan definitely has her own distinct take on the myth of Hades and Persephone, and on Mount Olympus itself. Dead Beautiful is funny and well-written, as well. What I like most is that Dugan imbues Persephone with a bit more intelligence than most adaptations; this Persephone makes her own choices and is actually powerful and intelligent. This made a lovely change from the thoughtless girl kidnapped by the God of the Dead.

The style of Dead Beautiful is very interesting. The story is told from many points of view: Demeter, Zeus, Persephone, Hades, and more. Each section, generally quite short, reminded me most of those confession cameras on reality shows. It was kind of like The Real World: Mount Olympus. The characters snipe at one another in their internal monologues, commenting on what the others are saying and how sick they are of being treated a certain way. This worked pretty well for the most part, and very much fit with her view of the gods.

Dugan's gods run Mount Olympus like a corporation, concerned with market share and that upstart Jesus who is trying to overthrow them with his peaceful mumbo-jumbo. This, too, was funny, although I wasn't a huge fan of the repetition of it throughout the book. The first time the point was made, I chuckled, but I wasn't invested enough in it to want more details.

My main issue with Dead Beautiful was the awkwardness of the setting. What time are they in? They seem to be in Roman times, during Jesus' lifetime. However, Zeus says at one point of something that 'it's along the lines of how radio frequency will function in eighteen, nineteen centuries' (92). Does this mean that the gods, or Zeus at the very least, can see the future, that they live, in essence, in all times? I would be okay with that, only, if that's the case, shouldn't they know that Jesus' religion will eclipse theirs? Shouldn't they know they will become solely fodder for fiction? Because they do not seem to know that. I found the whole thing disconcerting, with references to drachmas as the monetary system mentioned in the same breath as one character's possibly having ADD/ADHD. The book would have been much stronger with a bit more consideration of these points.

Although Dead Beautiful had some large issues, I definitely enjoyed reading it. There were enough new and amusing things that I was entertained all the way through.… (meer)

For those of you who don’t know the Persephone myth, a quick recap: Persephone, daughter of the Greek goddess of of the harvest, is abducted by Hades, the Greek god of the dead. Before she is rescued by her mother Demeter, she eats six pomegranate seeds. As a result, she is required to spend six months of every year with Hades and her mother is so distraught during those times that she neglects her job as goddess of the harvest and we have fall and winter. In Dead Beautiful, Melanie Dugan considers the possibility that Persephone wasn’t abducted after all but was just a rebellious teen who fell in love with Hades and didn’t have the courage to tell her mom.

At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the journal entry style in which this story is told. It made it a little harder to get into the story and the writing was a bit choppy at first. However, once I got into the story and events started to flow, the breaks between entries were no longer disruptive. At that point I ended up enjoying hearing everyone’s side of the story and I really liked that each of the characters had a unique voice.

I was also initially worried that the casual feel of the journal entries would be an excuse for poor writing, in large part because the first long entry was from the perspective of a rather ditzy character. I was wrong. While that particular character was not my favorite, I did like that she was distinctive, I thought the rest of the writing was superb, and I think it got stronger as the book progressed.

Although this could be categorized as a teen romance, it’s completely avoids some of the common short comings of the genre. Sure, Persephone is in love with Hades, but she doesn’t gush or act stupidly as a result. She very seriously considers her decision to go live with him. Their attraction to each other is physical, but they both also mention loving the intelligent conversations they share. Although the story only mentions their earlier conversations, it’s enough that this doesn’t feel like insta-love. There are a few weird little things, like them jumping so quickly to discussing marriage and Persephone (generally a strong character) almost fading away when she misses her mother, but I think those are acceptable artifacts of the starting myth.

Unlike the Percy Jackson series, which mostly uses Greek mythology to provide characters, Dead Beautiful borrows a lot more. Because of that and the journal-entry format, there isn’t much world building; this is definitely a character driven story. I appreciate good world building a lot, but the characters in this book were enough fun that the focus didn’t bother me. I would highly recommend this to anyone who likes Greek mythology or re-tellings in general, as this one was very well done.

This review first published on Doing Dewey.… (meer)