This is the perfect pandemic novel that illustrates perfectly the claustrophobic atmosphere and the psychological impact of prolonged lockdowns. The main character finds herself isolated with her husband and son and during the novel the tension between them is building up until a very shocking and climatic outcome.
The protagonist is constantly playing these mental games with herself, experimenting with lucid dreams, IChing, and Tarot, She is cynical and introspected in a very candid way. The author includes in every chapter a parallelism between different methods of divination and our narrator daily struggles to understand herself and the alienated world.
Full of interesting reflections and unanswered questions like:
Was the pandemic the universal humbling event that it was supposed to be?
Do challenging times really teaches us something about ourselves?
Is there a universal answer that we all need to hear to feel reassured?
I loved the short chapters and the pace. A very solid debut novel.

Like some other readers, I requested this one based on the cover and title, thinking it was another Greek retelling since those are so popular these days. This book was unexpected but good. I wonder if the addition of an electronic device for the woman on the cover would clue folks in that it is modern--maybe a laptop or tablet on her lap, or smartphone in her hand.

3,5 stars

In this COVID age, it takes a lot for me to want to pick up a book that discusses all of the trauma that we have collectively experienced over the past 2 years. Delphi, however, stood out in how it promised to connect the Greeks' obsession with knowing the future with our current landscape.

The book is certainly not an easy read with everything from COVID-19 to the Trump presidency to January 6 to teen suicide all playing a part in the narrative. It's one of those books that you feel strange saying that you enjoyed for fear that someone will mistakenly believe that you endorse or enjoy such awful things. Where my enjoyment truly derived from was the sense that not only was I watching our main character cope with the past two years, but the author as well. This is obviously not a biography or a true story by any means, but it was strangely comforting as an artist to watch another artist work through the thorny mire of life the only way that she knows how.

Thank you to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster for an ARC of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review!

This is a unique story about a classics academic obsessed with ancient prophecies while living through the pandemic. She makes connections between the ancient world’s dependence and reverence for prophecies with the current state of the world’s obsession with the absurd which has become a sort of oracular dependence for humanity. The narrator seems to be suffering from an existential crisis triggered by the pandemic where the strange times she is living in offers a reflection on all of the ills plaguing society (no pun intended). Each brief chapter is named for a type of divination that the narrator explains which she uses to try to understand where the future might be headed amidst lockdowns and breakdowns of life as she knows it.

This is a difficult book to rate. Using ancient Greek prophecies as a metaphor for the contemporary setting of the book was original. The chapters were quite short and it felt as though I was reading a diary. It doesn’t really have a storyline or plot, just random thoughts and opinions about the pandemic and all its craziness in comparison to the ancient world’s craze for oracles.

There were some interesting points made that I think could have been presented in a more traditional storyline which could have made this a potentially interesting dark academia novel.

This book had an intriguing premise, but the execution was mediocre. The characters weren't fleshed out enough and reading about the lives of ordinary people experiencing Covid lockdowns isn't very interesting when you've gone through it yourself.
It annoyed me that the narrator empathized with anti-mask conspiracy theorists when she saw them protesting on the street. Also, it was completely unnecessary for the narrator to point out that a nonbinary character "used to be a woman". I' don't like how she positioned this same character as a caricature of queerness.

I was fairly sure I wasn't going to want to read any of the inevitable influx of pandemic novels, and within that, ones about the travails of middle-class British parents would probably have been near the bottom of the bottom of the list. But the framing principle of this, hanging off various methods of prophecy, felt like a good angle, given how magical thinking loomed so much larger with the world upended, and that sense of the future being broken. Hell, was it any wonder if superstition strengthened when, at least for the little people, arbitrary and ever-shifting rules were suddenly a way if life? On top of which, I used to vaguely know Clare Pollard last century, but had never read more than a poem or two of hers. Turns out that as a poet turned novelist, she has something of the Patricia Lockwood about her, that ability to take the insane firehose torrent of the recent past and sift from it gem-like insights, then string them into something which has just enough of a veneer of fiction to sell to people who don't think they want to read essays. So just as Lockwood's narrator in No One Is Talking About This was famous for different tweets to the ones which brought Lockwood to wider attention, so the protagonist here did a different arts degree at the other half of Oxbridge, translates literature from different languages, and definitely can't be the poet Clare Pollard because at one point she quotes the poet Clare Pollard*. And as with that book, the concessions to plot were mostly my least favourite bits of Delphi, the ones which felt closest to plenty of other books – not least because much of the plot here concerns a couple who don't seem to like each other anymore, in a niggling, low-level sort of way, which may well be my least favourite trope in any medium, not least reality**. Even the observational material doesn't always land; the riff on smartphones as literally Faustian, for instance, has a good in but needs to go further or deeper or harder not to end up feeling more like a think piece than literature. More often, though, Pollard catches that 2020s sense of the mind turned inward and squirrelly, stitching together prognostications and terrors from whatever comes to hand, and if not all of the forms of divination which supply chapter headings are entirely familiar from the history of prophecy ("Shufflemancy; Prophecy by the Use of an Electronic Media Player"), well, I quite liked that as sly commentary on how the present has always reinvented the past in its own image. And even though I love this stuff, some of the nuggets the narrator finds down sleepless rabbit-holes were new to me: I was aware that AE Waite had been a bit bloody cheeky in getting his name affixed to that tarot deck, but not that he married his occultism with a managerial job at Horlicks.

Underlying and animating and unsettling all of this scrabbling after illumination, of course, the cognitive dissonance of knowing that one is living in a disaster movie, yet still having to go to meetings and queue in the supermarket – indeed, more so than before. All layered on top of the pre-existing apocalypses thanks to which the narrator is painfully aware, for all that sanity obliges all of us not to think about it too often, that "I don't even know if my son will live to middle age" (the fear going double in his case, with allergies there to pick up the slack even if climate collapse et al don't do the trick). If there were likely to be any future generations who'd have the luxury of reading fiction, one could say that Delphi serves as a fine record of the moment; as is, it's an impressive feat of taking the most scrutinised subject in history and still managing to show those of us who just about survived it a few details we'd not considered in quite that light.

*All of which said: I have never understood how the idea that female authors' leads in general are more likely to be thinly disguised versions of the writer than male authors' leads ever got off the ground, given we live in a world where Stephen King has sold a third of a billion books, at least 100 million of which star writers who, if not called Kevin Sting, might as well have been.
**I nearly did a gag there about reality in turn being my least favourite medium, but that wouldn't actually be true – it's third from last, just above opera and podcasts.

(Netgalley ARC)