Girl, Goddess, Queen

Girl, Goddess, Queen is a young adult fantasy novel by the British writer Bea Fitzgerald, published by Penguin in 2023. It retells the story of Persephone and Hades by refusing the version in which the god of the underworld takes a girl against her will.

In Fitzgerald's account Persephone is not carried off; she jumps. Her father means to marry her to a god who is more in love with himself than with her, so she removes herself from the arrangement and lands in the underworld, where the ruler is arrogant, annoying and, unfortunately for everyone, attractive.

Persephone's plan is to make Hades fall in with her ambitions and then use the underworld as a lever on Mount Olympus, which is run by the gods who told the first lie about her. The novel is built around the question of who gets to write a myth, and around a heroine far more interested in power than in romance. The consequences of her scheme, the book warns, can be deadly, and Fitzgerald keeps the tone light and the stakes high at the same time.