This book impressed me so much. There's such a wealth of thematic depth within it, and the prose is gorgeous all throughout.
The premise of the novel alone was intriguing to me from the get-go: a bildungsroman that serves as an anachronistic reinterpretation of a fragmentary poem by an Ancient Greek poet, and also a queer romance.
I worried that it'd be overly ambitious, and I was particularly concerned that the romantic elements might be underdeveloped or sappy. So, I was glad to be wrong, as I found the book to have a really grounded approach in regard to how it represented a first love. It was very effective in how it explored limerence and its impact upon the protagonist.
Speaking of the protagonist, there's 'Geryon', a red-winged monster who has palpable struggles that really moved me. Early on in the novel, it's made clear that Geryon was sexually abused as a child by his brother. This is something that Carson explores in the book, and she does so with a great deal of empathy.
She presents Geryon as a protagonist that transcends his suffering through Art, utilizing his writing of his own autobiography and his passion for photography as a means of escaping from his past trauma. His monstrous appearance in the novel is also used to display the means through which he conceals parts of himself, such as his wings, in order to avoid scrutiny. This is a way for Carson to explore aspects of Geryon that make him vulnerable and unlike others, through a physical representation of how his homosexuality and past trauma affect him.
