Daughter of the Hunt

I found this is a very strange book. Partly that is my fault, for reasons that I will explain. But it still goes places that the reader probably won’t expect.

Given that I loved the stories of Shizuka and Shefali that began with The Tiger’s Daughter, I have been wanting to catch up with what K Arsenault Rivera is doing now. When I saw a book that was billed as a romance between Artemis and a girl who has been sacrificed to her I could scent another disaster lesbians story, so I checked it out.

Shock number one: the story begins in modern day Sydney. Our heroine is the heir to a vast multinational corporation. But there is this weird superstition that they are under a curse which means that the CEO (father) and heir (heroine) cannot ever leave the corporate HQ.

But wait, our heroine is called Iphigenia. Her parents are called Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. We know where this is going, right?

Sure enough, things happen. Aunt Helen runs off with a chap from a rival corporation. Uncle Menelaus is furious. There is talk of war. And poor Iphy ends up getting sacrificed.

Which would be the end of things, and a very short book, or an intro to a re-telling of the Trojan War. This book is not that, because Artemis, being very much That Sort of goddess, does not approve of fathers killing their daughters. So she spares Iphigenia, but to maintain the illusion of a sacrifice she has to hide her away.

Much of Daughter of the Hunt therefore takes place in the Domain of Artemis, which of course is woodland. Iphigenia is to become a handmaiden of Artemis, which means that she needs to learn wilderness survival, hunting and so on. For a modern day Aussie girl who has never left the safety of her father’s high rise office, and has no skills beyond playing with computers, this is something of a challenge.

Rivera clearly knows a lot about wilderness survival. She goes on about it in a very Kim Stanley Robinson way, because she has done all of that research and she is absolutely going to put it all into the book.

Of course the book is also about the terrible injustice done to Iphigenia. As such it has more to do with Euripides’ play, Iphigenia at Aulis, than with the Iliad, and with the versions in which Artemis takes pity on the girl and replaces her with a deer.

The book is also about being the submissive partner in a BDSM relationship. You were not expecting that one, I suspect. But Artemis is famously virginal so her relationship with Iphy cannot be too conventional. Rivera seems to know a lot about BDSM, and the sex scenes in the book are a whole lot more sexy than many conventional sex scenes that I have read.

But of course the other reason why the relationship has to be like that is because Artemis is a goddess and Iphigenia is not. That’s not just a power differential. In this book the gods appear to be some sort of alien beings from another dimension. They are ten feet tall and are so scary that they have to wear masks when in the company of humans least we feeble creatures die of shock. Oh, and they eat humans.

Now I am intrigued. But does the book tell me any more about these strange creatures? No, it does not. Does it tell me why Eros is now a woman? Does it tell me why Zeus is referred to as ‘father’ but has female pronouns? No, reader, it does not.

And this is the point where I discover that I am reading book two of a series. I prompt curse myself for an idiot and go off to buy book 1, which is an Eros and Psyche re-telling. Hopefully that will help with my confusion. I will report back next month.

Update: the ‘gods’ of this series appear to be something of a combination of actual Greek gods and the Tylwyth Teg, but I’m still not a lot the wiser.

Title: Daughter of the Hunt
By: K Arsenault Rivera
Publisher: Forever
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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