“Deane’s tour de force debut …brings the familiar story to fresh, vivid, and unforgettable new life.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Drawing on ancient texts and modern archeology to reveal the trans woman’s story hidden underneath the well-known myths of The Iliad, Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing weaves a compelling, pitilessly beautiful vision of Achilles’ vanished world, perfect for fans of Song of Achilles, The Witch’s Heart, and the Inheritance trilogy.
The gods wanted blood. She fought for love.
Achilles has fled her home and her vicious Myrmidon clan to live as a woman with the kallai, the transgender priestesses of Great Mother Aphrodite. When Odysseus comes to recruit the “prince” Achilles for a war against the Hittites, she prepares to die rather than fight as a man. However, her divine mother, Athena, intervenes, transforming her body into the woman’s body she always longed for, and promises her everything: glory, power, fame, victory in war, and, most importantly, a child born of her own body. Reunited with her beloved cousin, Patroklos, and his brilliant wife, the sorceress Meryapi, Achilles sets out to war with a vengeance.
But the gods—a dysfunctional family of abusive immortals that have glutted on human sacrifices for centuries—have woven ancient schemes more blood-soaked and nightmarish than Achilles can imagine. At the center of it all is the cruel, immortal Helen, who sees Achilles as a worthy enemy after millennia of ennui and emptiness. In love with her newfound nemesis, Helen sets out to destroy everything and everyone Achilles cherishes, seeking a battle to the death.
An innovative spin on a familiar tale, this is the Trojan War unlike anything ever told, and an Achilles whose vulnerability is revealed by the people she chooses to fight…and chooses to trust.
Maya Deane (she/her) is a novelist, a visual artist, and an avid student of all the arts of civilization attributed to Inana by the first known writer, Enheduana. She would love to talk to you about the history of forks, the history of beer (and how the only woman who became king of Sumer was a bartender and brewer), cannabis-hotboxing Amazons in the archaeological record, the top three most famous eighteenth-century French trans women, how to cook ancient Canaanite food (hint: import bananas from India), and what it’s like making friends with a scholarly feline. (Shout-out to Apollo!) She is a graduate of the Rutgers-Camden MFA program in creative writing.
