Thus With a Kiss I Die

 

Thus With A Kiss I Die- Christina Dodd

 A John Scognamiglio Book

Release Date: June 24, 2025

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: I’m 20-years-old and by my own design, never been wed, free as no married woman ever is. I’m beautiful, but without conceit, for Juliet, my legendary Mamma is the most gorgeous creature to ever walk the earth. Just ask Romeo, my legendary Papà. (Rumors of their deaths were premature.) I was heartwhole until I fell (literally) in love with Lysander of the House of Beautiful. But our love was not to be, for I was thwarted by Escalus, the Prince of Verona . . . who had designs on me. 

I’m trapped. 

Then! I’m presented with a solution. Escalus’s father, Prince Escalus the Elder, appears to me. He tasks that I find his killer. Did I mention Elder is a ghost?

Given that I only recently dispatched Verona’s first serial killer, I’m less than pleased. Yet Elder promises to unite me with my One True Love, so I gather clues. Meanwhile, revolution threatens, for beneath Verona society’s glittering surface lurk dark shadows—and an enemy eager to make me a tragic heroine in my own right . . .

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After the events of A Daughter of Fair Verona Rosie (Rosalind Montague) was hoping for some quite time to figure out how to deal with her unwanted surprise betrothal to Prince Escalus- or even better, figure out how to get out of the betrothal. Then Escalus's father gives her the perfect solution: figure out who murdered him (yes, he's a ghost) and he'll help her out. That promise along with the fact that she can't back down from a challenge and Rosie's in. After all, how dangerous can investigating a 20 year old murder be?

Christina Dodd takes us back to Verona, where Romeo and Juliet didn't die but had a large family instead. Rosie claims to be the sensible one, but she's also headstrong and enjoys a challenge to prove she's as capable as any man. When murderers are about, some caution might be a good idea. In this book she shows some signs of growth into the role she'll inhabit as princess of Verone, and it will definitely be fun continuing to watch her drag the prince's household into her way of thinking. The signs are already clear in a few fun scenes (like when Rosie finally takes over the prince's kitchens) and she meets Escalus's grandmother, who looks like she'll be an enthusiastic participant. 

The scenes with Rosie and Escalus are a lot of fun, the two have good chemistry even if Rosie doesn't quite recognize that's what it is, and when Cal (as she starts calling him) gets off his dignity the two work really well together. Elder's ghost didn't contribute much to help solve the mystery but he is good comic relief.

The writing is mostly modern with some very comic one-liners: you should find yourself having some laugh out loud moments!

An excellent sequel to A Daughter of Fair Verona, I think I enjoyed it even more. A fun and fast summer read that will keep you entertained!

Penelope's Bones

Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer's World Through the Women Written Out of It- Emily Hauser

University of Chicago Press

Release Date: June 13, 2025

Rating: 📚📚📚

Synopsis: In Mythica Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world’s greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer’s epic poems, piecing together evidence from the original texts, recent astonishing archaeological finds and the latest DNA studies, she reveals who these women – queens, mothers, warriors, slaves – were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not – until now) remembered them.

A riveting new history of the Bronze Age Aegean and a journey through Homer’s epics charted entirely by women – from Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra and Aphrodite to Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso and Penelope – Mythica is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologized women of Greece’s greatest epics, and of the ancient world itself as we learn ever more about it.

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I had very mixed feelings with this book. On the one hand, there was some very cool information on the latest archaeaolgical research and discoveries. New technology means DNA can tell us about travel in the Late Bronze Age, if families are buried together, or prove that more warrior gravesites are women warriors than were earlier believed. Texts unearthed through the Hittite Empire introduce powerful queens helping to rule the Hittite world next to Troy, and letters and tablets have been unearthed that suggest enough similarities between pieces of Homer's poems and real life to make Hauser's arguments plausible that the epics contain fragments of memories for ways of life that would have probably been old when the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down. I enjoyed most of the archaeological information, because I like reading about that kind of thing. 

Other parts of the book were, to me, more of a stretch. There was a lot of repetition. Hauser clearly didn't trust her audience to remember who any of the characters were, so would remind you every single time- especially the women already less well known like Briseis. Once or twice I can understand, but it was really annoying having her do it all the time. Each chapter would start with a short fictional story, which I know is the current fad, but personally I find throws me out of the nonfiction narrative and I always find off-putting. Some chapters were a stretch in terms of subject matter. In Circe's chapter, for example, I expected to learn about the ancient world's views on magic, or women living alone, or something else that might focus on women. Instead it is mostly about pigs. Yes, Circe and pigs go together and Hauser manages to connect them to religion and briefly to the mystery cults, but I was hoping for more. 

Frequently in the chapters Hauser brings up the modern retellings we see that are so popular today. Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, and some of her own books as well. These additions missed the mark for me. The readers of those books may be part of the audience she's trying to reach with this book, but adding the retellings here in the chapters themselves isn't part of the story of Homer's world. It would have worked better in the introduction or conclusion as part of the conversation on why women are now retelling the stories and focusing on reclaiming the lives and voices of the women in Homer's world.

I had high hopes going into Penelope's Bones, and while I would overall recommend reading it, I can't say I was as impressed with the book as I had hoped to be. Maybe I was expecting too much out if it. After all, Trying to uncover what has been pushed to the margins for thousands of years, both by the erosion of time, the men of the time period and by male archeologists until fairly recently, doesn't give you a lot to work with.

I received an ARC of this boon from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review