Greco-Roman mythology + Roanoke colony + feminine rage = my kind of party.

I really did enjoy this book, and I loved the themes of feminism and women's rights, LGBTQ love and sisterly bonds, as well as exploring an interesting, yet also horrendous section of history (colonization yikes!). This was an easy to read novel, and an enjoyable one that I couldn't put down.

Also giiiirl, if you get queasy with mentions of v*mit, you’ve been warned because our leading woman be p*king.

Thank you to NetGalley & Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine | Dell for the ARC!

Those Fatal Flowers takes place partly on the Greco-Roman island of Scopuli and partly in the North Carolina colony of Roanoke. There are dueling timelines, which I personally enjoy. I did not have any issues following the "then" and "now" of the timeline. I became invested in Thelia (the main character) and her growth from a static character to a dynamic character, dealing with her past and guilt and the queer love story that develops. I felt that there wasn't enough detail with the settings (both of Scopuli and Roanoke), and I wish that I could have imagined these settings more clearly. I loved the imagery described for Thelia and her two sisters as sirens. I would have liked the novel more if I could have pictured/imagined the other characters and the setting more clearly in my mind. Overall, the plot was well done, the love story was great, and I found myself rooting for the main characters in the end. Congrats Shannon Ives on your debut novel.

"Those Fatal Flowers" promised sapphic longing and female rage and boy did it deliver.

Our guide through this century-spanning tale is Thelia. Once a handmaiden to the young goddess Proserpina, Thelia and her sisters were punished for failing to protect her from Dis - transformed into the monstrous Sirens and exiled to the island of Scopuli. This mythological origin story is braided with Ives' invented tale of the sisters' escape from exile, their payment made with the blood of vile men. Ives finds these vile men in the lost colony of Roanoke, offering an imagined explanation for the disappearance of those early colonists.

Disguised as a foreign princess and still reeling from the loss of Proserpina centuries earlier, Thelia finds connection with the women of Roanoke and ultimately seeks to liberate them from their patriarchal oppression.

This book was HARD to get into. The first half felt like watching paint dry, or rather like someone telling you about how they painted the wall instead of actually showing you the color. Thankfully, around the 60% mark, something finally happened, and the end was… okay I guess.

Things I Loved:
-Female rage and sapphic romance? Inject it directly into my veins.
-A revenge story always warms my hater heart.

Things I Didn’t Love:
-The amount of telling vs. showing here was wild.
-The romance was barely fleshed out, which is comical considering how exhaustively other things were described. We get five paragraphs on the textures of a room, but no real depth to the central love story? Bring back yearning.
-The one time indigenous people are mentioned, it’s just to compare their suffering to the white women in the colony…. I guess the sensitivity reader was on vacation?
-This book tried so hard to be profound that it just gave me the ick.

Overall, this was a disappointing reading experience . Thank you to NetGalley for the arc.

This was a very tough read for me personally, the story seems to drag on for the majority of the book - only picking up in the last quarter or so. I found myself consistently putting the book down and not wanting to pick it back up. Additionally, the mix of Greek and Roman mythology feels inconsistent. The author uses Roman names for Persephone and Hades, even though the story has Greek influences, and doesn’t explain why that choice was made. And I initially was very excited the idea of mixing Greek mythology and American history seemed like a really interesting take however this really seemed to drop the ball for me. There never seemed to be a real point as to why the setting of Roanoke was chosen, especially when it seemed the important aspects in relation to American history were what was removed from the story for the sake of the author feeling like it wasn't her place to tell that story? Which, that's fair, but then why choose this setting at all if you weren't planning on addressing any of the colonization aspects of it? Overall, this was a miss for me.

Told in dual timelines 'Those Fatal Flowers' ties together greek mythology and the lost colony of Roanoke in a way that makes complete sense. It's a brutal story- violence, sexual assault, homophobia, slavery... basically white men being entitled assholes. But there's a very satisfying ending to look forward to.

Thank you so much to the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me the pleasure of reading this masterpiece of a novel. I've seen this book everywhere lately, and now I know why. This book reminded me why I love reading about mythology so much, and a sapphic twist was the cherry on top. The strength of these characters was inspiring, and I can't wait to read more from this author.

A unique blend of Greco-Roman mythology and American history. I love Greek mythology, but this particular tale didn’t really hold my interest all that much. It was a good read, feministic and sapphic. This is perfect for fans of Madeleine Miller.

firstly, thank you to the publisher for an arc!

2.5 stars

not the best retelling i’ve read, and i’ve read many, but also not entirely the worst.

We uniquely begin this review with two brief lessons from two very different places in time: Greco-Roman mythology and Colonial American history! Proserpina’s abduction into the underworld is a very well-known myth. She was earthside, innocently picking flowers, when she was accosted, raped, and taken by The King of the Underworld (Pluto); her mother, Ceres, was so inconsolable she plagued the earth with her wrath, creating a devastating famine to deliver souls to the underworld in an unrelenting stream; in the meantime, Pluto deceived Proserpina into eating pomegranate seeds, ensnaring her there for eternity; Zeus decreed Proserpina would live half of her time with her mother on Earth and half with Pluto in the Underworld, which accounts for the seasons on Earth. The Nymph handmaidens who failed to protect the goddess were transfigured into the Sirens of legend, which were woman-bird hybrids continually questing to recover their fallen deity. Sirens are typically portrayed as beguiling temptresses, luring men to their watery graves with beautiful enchantments woven into song. The Lost Colony of Roanoke was a settlement in North America whose fate is a perplexing mystery still not agreed upon by historians in modern times. The settlement’s population totally disappeared with no clear explanation in sight. As the author shares with us in the author’s note, these people likely assimilated into the existing Native American populace for survival, but with no clear evidence, new adventures can always be written!

Shannon Ives’ debut novel entitled Those Fatal Flowers captivates the reader with a fascinating and propulsive plot, stunning character complexity, and enduring thematic resonance! This chimeric creation cleverly constellates juxtaposing elements, effectively breathing new life into mythos harvested from Greco-Roman antiquity and creatively giving us a new theory on what obviously happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Initially, I just could not see how connections could be made between the Lost Colony of Roanoke and classical Roman Mythos, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover this thrilling and heartening story of sisterhood standing in solidarity of the female experience: this is a story of women flowering in the face of unfathomable hardships. Our tale begins in the aftermath of Proserpina’s abduction from ancient days, takes the reader on a thrilling, time-traveling odyssey to the wilds of North America during colonial times, and maroons the reader back in reality with much to contemplate! I immensely enjoyed reading the alternating past and present timelines with our narrator and main character, Thelia. She is one of the handmaidens mentioned above, in addition to her sisters Pisinoe and Raidne. I was easily able to see the incredible evolution her character undergoes in many respects since I could see a sort of natural compare-contrast occurring between the past and present psyches. Her moral development where she moves away from thinking in absolutes (namely, all men are bad; all women are good) and emotional maturation where she can find her own salvation and finally move forward to nascent beginnings had me totally engrossed. There are valuable lessons to be discovered within the pages of this book on the subject of men and monsters, learned through the lens of both real and fictional women that came before us. Thelia came to know cruelty as multifaceted, with humans in general---not just men---being the painters of its innumerable nuanced hues. I appreciated her beastly ferocity as much as I enjoyed seeing a more human side start to grow. I really liked that Thelia got a love story, and I thought it was very fitting to be one forged from harrowing circumstances and tragically entangled within the threads of fate. Ives presents the reader with powerful commentary on feminine fury and the consequential ferocity of female transformation and empowerment. The author also has oral symbolism woven throughout the book, displaying what truly endangers the power of patriarchy. Some of these include the power of oral storytelling (gossip, mythology, same thing, right?!) and the seductive power of the sirens and their song, both of which possess the probable kiss of death for their audiences.

I highly recommend picking up this book. Move over, Madeline Miller!

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Randomhouse Publishing Group-Ballantine/Dell for the ARC and the opportunity to share what I think! All opinions are my own. I will be posting this review on my Goodreads and Instagram accounts.

Going into this I thought it was Greek mythology and I hadn't read the summary properly. It is about Greek mythology, but it is about a siren traveling to the Roanoke colony in America. It's a weird combination, and I don't think the use of such an early American colony was well executed.

The problem with the Roanoke colony is that the horror mythos surrounding it is very much about how unthinkeable it was to colonizers at the time that these people might have joined an indigenous tribe living nearby, which is nowadays the most probably explanation for the people disappearing. In this book, this obviously isn't the case, but there are no named indigenous characters either. The author claimed that wouldn't be her story to tell, but I think this is worse.

The story itself was enjoyable, and I think it could have worked with a different setting. Most of the men in the colony are portrayed as bad, which is fair, but largely for their misogyny. The colonialism is mentioned here and there as another reason they're bad, but it's not what the focus is on, and it almost feels erased from the narrative. The female characters, apart from the mother of the main nasty guy, are also mostly portrayed as good or at least victims of the situation who didn't choose to come there, but while that may be true, I think the situation is a little more complex than that, and I don't feel the story really dove into this. I'm really not sure why this setting was chosen for this story, as the main plotline was siren from greek mythology goes to christian town filled with shitty men to turn them into sacrifices. Lots of places where that could have happened.

The concept of a siren who was in love with Proserpina (Persephone) was interesting, and I did like how this past affection keeps haunting the narrative. At the end, I'm still not sure what the point of Cora resembling Proserpina was, apart from having Thelia be drawn to her faster.

I would not recommend this book.

I was really drawn in by this book’s premise but I ultimately feel disappointed about it as a whole. I enjoyed the dual narrative timelines as a method of storytelling and appreciated the parallels drawn between Greek mythology and Christianity, but I felt like it failed to really flesh out either side of this story. Instead of having a good part of the book dedicated to Thelia and her sisters’ relationship prior to their exile, their struggles on the island, and the depth of their betrayal/how exile felt for all three, we are only provided the barest of glimpses into this relationship that Thelia claims is what drives her to go on this mad search for men to sacrifice. Similarly, we are encouraged to root for these colonizer women who are painted as women without agency due to their circumstances, but there are so many of them who are only afforded the barest of details in favor of more detailed descriptions of the men. Finally, the fact that this story was set in 1600s Roanoke but there was almost zero mention of the indigenous folks living in that area except for references to a massacre and the captured women who washed ashore her island really rubbed me the wrong way.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for this free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

What happens when you mix a mystery from America’s history with mythology, feminist rage, and romance? This book, which presents an interesting case: what if sirens from Greco-Roman mythology were responsible for the disappearance of the inhabitants of the lost colony of Roanoke?

Our main character is Thelia, one of three sisters who act as handmaidens to Proserpina (Persephone). They were transformed into winged creatures to assist in the search for their charge when she was abducted by Dis (Hades). When they fail to find and rescue the goddess, they are imprisoned on an island as punishment. There, they lure sailors with their singing. After hundreds of years, Thelia learns there may be a way to lift the curse she and her sisters are under, but it requires the sacrifice of many treacherous men…something the English colony of Roanoke in the Americas has more then a few of.

I liked the unique premise of the story and the bits detailing the lives of Thelia and her sister sirens on the island of Scopuli. The prose is pleasing to read. However, I don't much buy or like the romance subplot. It's a little too heavy on the instalove without any elaboration or further build up. I'm also not sold on the more modern slang used for the Puritans in Raleigh. It's not a slam dunk recommendation for me, but I did enjoy it!

An awesome Greek retelling. This author is a great new voice in Historical retellings. A blast of a book!

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for the arc of this book. All opinions are my own.

I really loved this one! I am not the best at writing reviews sometimes, but sometimes books take you by surprise and this one did just that. I got invested a few chapters in and couldn't put it done. It was so good! I highly recommend this one.

It kept me on the edge all the time. The story revolves around a mystery tied to a series of solving floral symbols. Has a steady pacing. The characters were well developed

Reading the synopsis of the books, it should be everything I like: sapphic yearning, female rage, female friendship, and raging against the patriarchy. While at times I enjoyed it, the story didn’t quite hit for me. The pacing was slow, especially with the dual timelines, but it does pick up at the 80% mark. The sapphic love story is a slow burn as the characters are romantically intertwined with other characters. With that being said, I think the book is well written, and it will certainly make you feel female rage.

Lastly, I would encourage folks to check the trigger warnings as there are a number of warnings associated with this book.

Thank you to Shannon Ives, Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine | Dell, and to NetGalley for providing an ebook in exchange for an honest review.

3 Stars?
The premise was undeniably fascinating but somewhere it got lost. If you're going to depict colonial US, please show the indigenous community too. That said, the writing was pretty good and we def got an unhinged sapphic story.

DNF at 30%. Thank you for the ARC but this is just not grabbing and hooking me. The writing is a little convoluted and it’s annoying how often Thelia mentions Proserpina in a sexual context when I’m only 30% through. It’s clear that they were lovers from the beginning, it doesn’t need to continue to be an overt point.

Discover: This sapphic retelling of the mythological sirens, which unfolds in dual timelines between the lost colony of Roanoke and the legendary island of Scopuli, emphasizes the power of women.

Review continues on Shelf Awareness...