I Never Liked You Anyway

Kurella’s debut novella jumps on the popular trend of modern Greek myth retellings and lands squarely in the middle of the stage, singing for the back rows. In life, Eurydice was a music major who spent her days at the piano trying to find her own voice among more talented peers. Then she fell in love with Orpheus, a swaggering enfant terrible with a rock star’s charisma. He loved her back—but a little too much, and in all the wrong ways. Now Eurydice is dead and trapped in the Afterlife, where she’s forced to review all her flaws and failures as the gods teach her how to be a proper ghost so that she can either move on or be reincarnated. But Eurydice has never been a proper anything, and instead of conforming, she sets out to finish the work her death interrupted: learning who she is and all she’s capable of. By turns funny, sexy, and wrenching, Kurella’s beautifully queer take on this story shows Eurydice’s full and compelling humanity. The cutthroat art school setting makes the egos of the Greek heroes feel entirely natural, and Kurella’s got the chops to set music on the page. The result is good fun for any fan of mythological remixes. Agent: Matt Belford, Tobias Literary. (Aug)