Happy New Year! I’m participating in a New Year, New Books blog hop hosted by YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Addicts. That means giveaways and other fun stuff. Read on for details and meet Eos, the goddess of dawn and new beginnings who has a weakness for handsome mortals.
Articles and Links:
New Young Adult Books: What’s Coming in 2022?
New Year’s in the Slytherin Common Room: Celebrating the Most Ruthless & Ambitious Characters in YA
2022 LGBT Books We Are Excited For
New Beginnings No Matter the Season
Non-Resolutions (Unless You Were Born in January)
Eos: Goddess of the Dawn
Sitting between darkness and light, Eos is the Greek goddess of dawn who rises at the start of each day and chases away the darkness. What’s a better symbol for new beginnings? You can’t have a beginning without an ending, so often they’re bitter-sweet, somewhere between happy and sad, the old and the new, the dark and the light.
I like her because she’s a bit adventurous. She also has some pretty sweet wings and is the mother of the stars and the wind. Eos has a bit of a weakness for handsome warriors, starting with Ares, the god of war, and because of the curse, it never ends well for her.
Eos had a brief fling with Ares, who Aphrodite already loved. I think this is interesting because it shows how beautiful Eos is since she drew his eye from the goddess of love herself. It also shows how ballsy she is. As expected, when Aphrodite finds out, she’s not thrilled and she curses Eos to have an insatiable lust for mortal men. Only mortal men, which took Ares out of the picture. Well played, Aphrodite, but that’s pretty cold.
As a result, Eos has a string of mortal loves, including the famous hunter, Orion, but they always leave her. When she falls in love with the Trojan prince, Tithonos, they are so happy together that she doesn’t want to lose him. She petitions Zeus to make him immortal, so they can be together forever. Zeus agrees and everyone was happy. Then, she realizes she forgot to ask Zeus not to make him age. So, although he’s immortal, while she stays young and rosy and beautiful, Tithonos gets old and frail, and his body starts to fail. As he wasted away, she was miserable watching him suffer.
She went back to Zeus and begged him to make Tithonos young again, but he refused. Instead, they compromised, and Zeus turned him into a cicada. I’m not sure why they chose a grasshopper or if that’s better or worse, but Tithonos became a cicada. The legend is that in some parts of the world, the cicada can be heard as Eos passes overhead, bringing the dawn.
Her story is interesting because, unlike other gods, Eos doesn’t take out her sorrow and frustration on other people. No matter what happens, Eos picks herself up and keeps going. She gets cursed by Aphrodite, but that doesn’t stop her from falling in love over and over. Her loves all leave her, but she still opens her heart to the next one. I think her story is one of resilience. Even after Zeus maliciously “misunderstands” her request to make Tithonos immortal, and she loses her true love, she still keeps driving her chariot and bathing the sky in gold each morning.
Into the Labyrinth – Free Short Story
Before Ariadne became a legend with Theseus, she was a mischievous princess of ancient Crete. As a girl, she wanted desperately to sneak into the labyrinth and see the deadly Minotaur. After several failed attempts, she spots something in Daedalus’ workshop that just might do the trick. But, if she can make it in, will she be able to get out? Or will she perish in the labyrinth like everybody else who has gone in?
This is a prequel short story to Ariadne’s Crown.
Mega Giveaway
