Still, being a modern girl, Pierce knows she has to take care of herself - because no one else will. Meanwhile, she has to try to outmaneuver vengeful Furies while suffering the more pedestrian humiliations of trying to fit in at her new Florida high school. She loses all interest in working with animal rescue groups and is even stripped of the role of Snow White in a school play, because she identifies a little too much with that heroine frozen in her glass coffin. Her accident prompts her parents to divorce, her best friend to dump her and her grades to plummet. Pierce struggles to regain the life of a normal teenager now that she’s seen what lies beyond. Except for the being dead part.”īut coming back to life proves more difficult than just giving that silver-eyed death deity the slip. And the recently deceased are sorted into the blessed and the damned by a posse of intimidating men, who, like nightclub bouncers, are clad in black leather, their heads shaved bald and their bodies elaborately tattooed.Īt one point, Pierce tells her deathly captor: “I have to let my mom know I’m all right. This is Hades as seen through the eyes of a 21st-century teenager: there’s not even cellphone reception down there, for God’s (gods’?) sake. With vampires, werewolves and mermaids already in wide circulation, here Greek mythology becomes fodder for a modern supernatural romance, one that grapples with the question of how to go on living in the face of death.īut the archetypes from mythology are also put to comic effect, and sly humor helps leaven the dark material. In “Abandon,” which is the trilogy’s first installment, Cabot, author of the frothy “Princess Diaries” series, ventures into darker realms. She wears the proof around her neck in the form of an enchanted diamond necklace, a gift from that “aggravatingly attractive” underworld guy, John Hayden, the one who keeps showing up despite the fact that she has a pulse again. More than an hour passes, and then she is miraculously revived.īut two years later and back among the living, Pierce is haunted by memories of the underworld, especially the stormy death deity who angled to keep her there with him for eternity.Ī battery of psychiatrists has tried to convince her that all that afterlife nonsense is just so much lucid dreaming.
There’s nothing like coming back from the dead to ruin a girl’s life.įifteen-year-old Pierce Oliviera, the heroine of Meg Cabot’s new modern-day Persephone trilogy, drowns in the family pool while trying to rescue an injured bird.
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