The Palace of Eros

This sapphic and trans retelling of the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros was a tour de force of feminist and sexual liberation.  Scouring the reviews online, this book received a varied mix of love and disappointment, mostly because of the prose.  It’s very flowery prose.  At times it feels stream of consciousness, filling up the scant plot with tons and tons of pretty sentences over-describing the thoughts going through Psyche’s head at any point in the story.  I found it annoying at first but quickly came to appreciate and eventually drown in the sensuousness of the prose.  I love good prose but sometimes it can get annoying and cloying.   Here, I reveled in it.  It made the passionate scenes between Psyche and Eros real and erotic while almost never mentioning body parts.  This book was nominated for a 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Speculative Fiction.  Making a guess based on reading so many of the winners and nominees over the life of the Award, I would place bets that this is the one to beat.

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