As the tittle suggests, I saw Hadestown last week on Broadway and got absolutely obsessed with it.
So I’d like some books that feel like the musical. It could be a rewriting of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a story with the same elements (yearning, going to the underworld, music, poverty, something else) or a book that has the same aesthetic as Hadestown in terms of the jazzy music, or the costumes.
Usually, I read a bit of everything; YA, fantasy, historical, romance, science-fiction. I don’t have any big pet peeve, but I just can’t read too much spice. I’ve already read His Dark Materials (my favorite books ever, with a similar plot relative to the underworld in the third book), and I’m going to read Girl, Goddess, Queen by Bea Fitzgerald since it is about Hades and Persephone.
If you have some suggestions to scratch that itch in my brain, that would be awesome. Thank you in advance!
by clep_sydre
5 Comments
You might try Dorothy Baker: Young Man with a Horn, jazz age novel
You’d probably like The Incarnations Of Immortality series. Most of the series can be read as stand-alone books if you want to start with Wielding A Red Sword which has a lot of singing.
Job; A Comedy Of Justice is a romantic/sci-fi retelling of Job from the Old Testament and has a lot of poverty
OOONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A RAILROAD LIIIIINE
I’m following this to see what’s suggested! Cos like, what made hadestown so great IMO wasn’t just the tale of Orpheus and Euridice – it was the industrial / climate change / socialist narrative they managed to make it.
So yes. More like that please!
I fed this same infatuation with Scarlett St Clair’s A Touch of Darkness series but complained A LOT about the fact Hades and Persephone can’t go two chapters without a sex scene by the end of the series (the sexual content increases as you go on, I swear). Overall, it’s pretty consistent with Hadestown ideas and it’s not like the plot only exists to connect sex scenes or the sex scenes are just added for the “I only read spicy” crowd but it was too much and I ended up largely skimming/skipping them by the end. I did recently read and love Wallis Kinney’s A Dark & Secret Magic which is a looser retelling.
* **Raybearer**/**Redemptor** by Jordan Ifueko is a YA duology that features a quest to the underworld, and I thought it was very good. It also shares other elements with *His Dark Materials* (a manipulative parent, animal companions).
* On my TBR, so I don’t know how good it is, but it looks like it might be right up your alley: **Death’s Country** by R.M. Romero.
(*Girl, Goddess, Queen* is a very fun book, although I think the vibe is very different.)