YA Book Review: Cora:The Unwilling Queen by Amy Hutchinson

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Cora: The Unwilling Queen by Amy Hutchinson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Cora Dell is a 17-year-old high school junior who lives with her parents in San Francisco, California. She has the usual compliment of teenage concerns, including whether or not she'll have enough time to finish reading Brave New World and stylistic conflicts with her best friends Joanna and Roxy. (If the trio were the Powerpuff Girls, Cora would be the Blossom, Joanna would be the Bubbles and Roxy would be the Buttercup.) Oh yeah, and she also has super-realistic dreams in which she visits the Underworld and is courted by its unnamed ruler, who wants her to be his wife. In some ways, Cora resembles the mythological Persephone, who was also called Kore in her maiden aspect. Her mother, Deidre, works in a plant conservatory and is a vegan, reminding readers of the plant-loving earth goddess Demeter of classical Greek mythology. Like Persephone, Cora is promised to the Underworld ruler by her father without her mother's knowledge or permission.

The Underworld ruler is never called Hades (or Aidon), and he already has a wife/queen who, when Cora meets her, states that she's not Persephone but started out as a mortal woman just like Cora. The Underworld itself seems to resemble the classical Greek version thereof, a bleak sunless landscape in which the souls of the dead slowly lose their individual identities, although some are better off than others. There seems to be the possibility of moving to a more heaven-like afterlife (perhaps similar to the Elysian Fields), and those in the Underworld seem to be able to die a second death, after which they are completely annihilated. This is the very fate that Cora wishes to avoid for Søren, an Underworld resident whom she comes to care about. In fact, Cora is willing to make an enormous sacrifice for Søren's life; she agrees to marry the Underworld ruler and stay with him for half of the year (the Persephone deal, although in some versions of the myth, Persephone spends only the winter in the Underworld).

I really enjoyed this book, and particularly the way it combines Cora's normal teenage life with her nocturnal (and ultimately more long-term) visits to the Underworld. It's obvious that Cora isn't merely dreaming the Underworld or making it up inside her mind, but it's also not entirely clear what it is that makes her different from other teenage girls, other than the fact that her biological father's an enormous jerk. The novel ends with quite a cliffhanger, with Søren's fate hanging in the balance and Cora not knowing what's going to happen once she becomes queen. (The last page says the conclusion is to come in Summer 2013.) I'd recommend this book for anyone who enjoys mythologically-inspired books like The Lightning Thief (which I haven't read, but which my niece adores - Cora will be passed to her next), The Goddess Test and The Shadow Thieves. I'll be excited to read the conclusion and, perhaps, have some of my questions answered.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Discloser: I won this book in a contest on Goodreads. I received no other compensation for this review, which represents my own honest opinion.

Imbolc Eve, the goddess Kali and Kara Stanton

The sabbat of Imbolc is approaching - or, in some parts of the world, already here. We're getting ready to celebrate the approach of spring and, in the Irish-Celtic tradition, pay honor to the fire goddess Brigid (or Bride, pronounced "breed"). Even though that grumpy groundhog almost always sees his shadow and forecasts six more weeks of winter's chill (in the temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, anyway), Imbolc always fills me with hope that spring is just around the corner.

Actually, this winter's hardly been harsh at all. I went for a walk the other night and it was 50 degrees (F) outside, temperatures I'd normally expect in late March at the earliest. I can't even really complain about the winter of 2012-2013, and the winter of 2011-2012 was similarly mild.

But though this time of year is traditionally reserved for Brigid, I am feeling the spiritual vibrations of another goddess today: India's Kali.

http://pinterest.com/pin/46936021088634658/

Not too long ago, I finished a breezy, humorous novel by Sonia Singh called Goddess for Hire. The Indian-American heroine of that novel finds out at the age of 30 that she's an incarnation of the goddess Kali.



She gets a powerful sword and sets out to vanquish evil. Another pop-cultural incarnation of the warrior woman who slays her enemies in a quest for justice? Kara Stanton.

Stanton seems to divide Person of Interest fans: we love her or hate her. Personally, I love her, the ex-Marine, CIA-trained assassin who shoots to kill without blinking an eye or smudging her lip liner. She's not evil, per se, but she is amoral. She'll do anything to survive. She reminds me of Scarlett O'Hara when she goes to dig up the neighbor's field because she's starving, exhausted, staring up at the sky and shouting, "As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again!" Kara's just determined that nobody's going to fuck with her anymore.

This the promo for the episode that airs tonight. I'm scared. I'm not really worried about Reese - they're not going to kill off one of the series regulars mid-season. However, I do think there's a good chance Stanton, Mark Snow or both of them are going to die tonight. I will really miss Stanton if she finally gets killed for real.

That's assuming she can be killed. I kind of think she's another incarnation of Kali, a death goddess. That's my hope: that Stanton lives to BAMF it up another day, whether it's as part of a redemptive arc (i.e. she decides to start working for Reese and Finch on a contract basis, like another POI chick I love, Zoe Morgan) or as the villain.



If Stanton does die, I may (against my better judgment) have to start watching Annie Parisse's other show, Fox's The Following. It just premiered on Monday last week, and I've only seen the first episode, which didn't even have Parisse in it. It's about a serial killer English professor and his murderous disciples (kinda like Kali's Thuggees) who kill based on tortured extrapolations on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. I'm disinclined to like the series because a) it gives me the creeps and b) it links one of the greatest figures of 19th-century American literature with gruesome killings and mutilations. Here you can read Laura Miller's Salon.com article about specific ways in which The Following disses the creator of "The Raven."

(I'm rooting for the Baltimore Ravens in the Superbowl, by the way, because the San Francisco 49ers were not named after a poem.)

So please, Kara Stanton, don't leave me. I'll still have Joss Carter and Zoe Morgan, plus that psycho Root (played amazingly by the talented and oh-so-lovely Amy Acker, whom I cannot wait to see in Much Ado About Nothing). But they've already killed off the dutiful Alicia Corwin, and can you ever really have enough strong female characters? Of course not.

Note to self: write The Following parody in which crazed Jane Austen fans go around yarnbombing things, but with embroidery instead of knitting.

The other goddess I'll be thinking about today is Kore/Persephone. The copy of Cora: The Unwilling Queen that I won from GoodReads arrived in the mail today, directly from the home of its author, Amy Hutchinson. I know I need new books like I need more holes in the head, but I still can't help but squee! when they arrive.

Hungry for more pomegranate-laden books about Persephone? Check out this batch and also this one.