The Immortals

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

February 16, 2016 · Orbit

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The Immortals (Olympus Bound) is an urban fantasy with tons of action and mythology and a very ass-kicking heroine. Selene DiSilva is actually the goddess Artemis, and she and the other gods from Olympus are living semi-human lives. They age slowly, and some are losing their powers bit by bit as they are no longer worshiped on earth. When a woman is murdered in a ritual that is connected to Artemis, Selene investigates. She has to conceal herself from the police and from those who are re-creating a powerful ancient ritual, and she must hide her true identity from Theo, a Classics professor who knows almost as much about mythology as she does.

I have been struggling with how to review this book. If you pick it up thinking it has a strong romance plot, it doesn’t. In fact, the romance between the protagonists, such as it is, jumps ahead with enough unanswered questions – questions that are constructed with substantial gravity by the plot – that I didn’t quite believe it happened. I finished the book thinking, “Well, that was cool. But how are they going to work that out?”

As a mystery with a quest involved, it wasn’t terrifically strong either. I saw through one of the red herrings and knew who was really doing all the Very Bad Things in part because there weren’t that many characters introduced to begin with. Plus, given the structure of having Greek mythology overlaid on New York City and the degree to which fantasy and realism are joined to create the story, I didn’t think any last minute characters were going to be introduced so the Bad Stuff could be pinned on them.

More over, for a private investigator, I found Selene to be easily charmed by her own confirmation bias. Once she decided who it HAD to be doing the Bad Things, all evidence supported her conclusion, even when it did not. Being alive for millennia didn’t make her any smarter at times when she needed better perspective.

But when I started reading it, I had a really difficult time putting it down. The world building made for addictive reading, even when I was reading things I usually don’t read.

I had nightmares several days in a row from having read this book. The violence is in service to a larger ritual, which makes it more scary for my brain, and more likely for it to be served up by my unconscious mind in funhouse horror dreams.

YET I kept reading. Why did I do that to myself?

For one thing, I had to keep going to find out what happened and how the Bad Guy was going to get what was coming to him. I had to see how the boundaries between the protagonists were going to be resolved. But most of all: world building. Good world building can make me leap over things that otherwise would stop me immediately.

The close relation of Greek and Roman mythology to the real world of Manhattan kept me intrigued. In urban fantasy, the closer the magical otherworld is to the real world I inhabit, the more I’m interested in reading it. I am much more curious and easily invested in secret worlds that exist a few millimeters alongside the one in which I reside than I am in stories that take place in very far off, very distant worlds that are completely disconnected from my own.

I was describing this book to a few people and said it was like the Rick Riordan series had a very steamy affair with some of the Robert Langdon books. Then feminism was poured all over both of them, and this book was the result. There are little clues and mysteries everywhere, puzzles in every chapter that the characters have to decipher or solve, and a larger quest that looms over everything in which gods and goddesses who are peeved about one thing or another are trying to damage each other for a few millennia.

The idea of gods and goddesses living among humans is one thing, but the way in which the absence of worship and the absence of tribute affects Artemis is fascinating. Meanwhile, gods whose attributes are still worshiped, such as death, communication, technology, travel, vanity – they’re all fine and pleasantly powerful.

Theo, as a brilliant human, wasn’t as compelling for me as Selene. Selene is the reason to read this book. I’m amused by the reviews I’ve read that describe her as cold and unlikeable, ruthless and cruel. She’s Artemis; all that fits the profile. Selene’s involvement in the mystery is also unavoidable. When Those Doing Bad Things killed a young woman who called out to her in supplication as she died, Selene was compelled to helped. As the Protector of Innocents and of Women, Artemis takes that woman’s death very personally, though as old as she is and as long as she’s lived among humans, she’s lost much of her powers and abilities.

Selene has a long history with New York, too. Once the gods left Olympus, they found places to live on earth, and Selene has always lived on Manhattan island. She has memories of the Lenape, of Alexander Hamilton (if her version is true, there’s going to need to be a rewrite of some musical numbers), of people who lived in New York hundreds of years ago that she knew and cared for. Selene can’t remember much of her life as a goddess before the Olympians came to live on earth, but she remembers some of it, and has very little patience for people currently alive trumpeting the importance of their own history given that she’s lived for thousands of years. She also remembers the real role of women that has been erased, and watches how men rewrite history to their own advantage. She pokes holes in a lot of Theo’s interpretations of mythology – interpretations written in part by men – and demands that he reexamine his perspective.

One of the central questions affecting the characters is the loss of humanity. When you chase power, you lose empathy and your ability to care about happens to other people. As a god, Artemis gave no shits because she had immense power – unless you did something to personally offend her and then she raged and killed until she felt satisfied. The Artemis of mythology and the Selene of this story both have a temper, but how her rage is focused and triggered changes for Selene. As a semi-god, or fraction-of-god who lives among humans, she learns to care for humans, and for what happens to them. She struggles a lot with the degree to which she has feelings, because as a goddess, she didn’t have to care about humans much at all, and she didn’t. They were fungible.

Selene moves from needing to solve the mystery because it insulted her realm as a goddess, to needing to solve it to stop the person who is killing the emblems under her protection, such as hounds and virgins, to needing to stop the ritual because she cares about the people who are being and who have been hurt.

There’s also a lot of dialogue, which is all of my catnip. I highlighted a few passages in the book, including this one, which is my favorite. Theo’s best friend, Gabriela, also a museum curator, has a terrific moment when she calls out the museums of New York after ritual items are stolen:

[Theo:] “I just think -“
“That it’s racist that they put brown people in dioramas down the hall from the dinosaurs as if they were some other form of extinct wildlife, while the white people wind up in art museums and historical societies? I couldn’t agree more.”

So many of the people in this story actively question history that puzzling over what happened in the plot AND what happened a few hundred years ago becomes part of the reading. Because Theo and the other classics professors study ancient societies, they teach and circle the question of whose history is more or less valid, and whose history and interpretation thereof has more to teach modern society. There’s ancient Greek history, the history of New York before and after colonials arrived, and the history that created the museums we tour today as “natural history.” Then there’s the history of the crimes being committed, and the history that’s informing what crime will be next. And there’s tension between what’s the museum-sanctioned official history and the history that is ignored or placed down the hall in small galleries, and whether that’s modern history or ancient history, or both.

The human tension between Selene’s half-life as she’s living it now, and Theo’s life as a professor and historian, affect the romance, but not always in satisfying ways. As I said earlier, how their lifespans affect one another, and how their lives will continue from the end the book, all of that is left unanswered, so I am more puzzled than satisfied. I know this is a series, so I know there will be more, but whether the future books will focus on other gods or on Theo and Selene, I have no idea. I haven’t found much information about book two. I think I’ll have to read it, though, because there’s enough unanswered about Theo and Selene that I want to know how their being together affects her. (I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, so apologies for vagueness.)

It’s weird to recommend a book that I didn’t always enjoy reading. Well, no, that’s not true. I enjoyed reading it – very much. I didn’t enjoy having read it and then having violent nightmares because of it. So if I read book two, I’ll need some coffee to get me through the days afterward when I wake up at 3 and can’t go back to sleep.

I remember when I studied in Spain, I walked on streets in Salamanca that were traveled by students long before North America was inhabited by anyone other than indigenous people. There were buildings I walked past each day that were older than the US as a country. There were streets that existed alongside much of recorded history. I won’t even get started on the aqueducts. It is both exhilarating and humbling to locate yourself in various timelines of human existence.

Likewise, there is an immense, beating power in adding long distance history — the history of a land and not a people, the history of things that are mostly forgotten, the history that’s older and outside of white people — to a story. It’s the mixture of history that makes this book work so well for me. I figured out the superficial mystery of who is doing Bad Things. I knew Selene and Theo were attracted to one another and would probably end up together (though I’m still unsure of the how and the effects of their being together, as I said). But the way in which ancient beings and the many different versions of history and mythology coexist, that’s what makes this book terribly compelling. The blended reality and mythology, the contrast of the history of New York as currently housed in museums versus its history as a place on earth where people lived before the colonies existed, combine with the writing to make the story very memorable.

I read this book even though it gave me nightmares. Strange praise, but praise nonetheless.