Ellie Spencer is a Pākehā (non-Māori) New Zealander, who is going through a rough time. She’s just started her senior year at an elite boarding school and is struggling to make friends and adjust to life on the South Island. However, when her new friend Kevin ropes her into a college production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, she discovers that he is falling under the spell of a mysterious woman with inhuman eyes and an aversion to cooked food. To make matters worse, Ellie has a strange encounter with Mark, an enigmatic classmate, that leaves her seeing her world with different eyes. To save Kevin, Ellie must embrace the idea that the mundane and mythology meld together to create a greater, scarier, more magical reality. 

Author Karen Healey imagines a world where the mythologies that we carry with us are true. Ellie’s New Zealand is layered with Māori mythology, and it permeates every aspect of this book. However, Ellie is very much a child of a blended culture, so she also draws on her knowledge of ancient Greek mythology to navigate the strange circumstances that confront her. Circe becomes an analog for Reka, the woman who is after Kevin, until Ellie and her friends can figure out what exactly Reka really is. Later, when Māori stories leave Ellie without a way forward, she turns to Greek mythology to forge a new path. 

Ellie herself is an unconventional heroine, and it’s a pleasure to spend time with her. She’s big and tough, with a difficult family life and a martial arts background. Normally, this is a recipe for a belligerent character. In Ellie’s case, it gives her a grounded sense of the damage a kick can do. Early in the book, she spends a lot of time trying to convince a bunch of college boys not to break each other’s arms, and I’m here for it. The other characters are all well developed and highly diverse. Kevin and Mark are both of mixed Māori ancestry, and Kevin is asexual. His sexuality is more than just a side note, too, since his sudden interest in Reka raises immediate alarm bells. Kevin’s college friend Iris is a Chinese New Zealander majoring in Māori studies, and Ellie’s Classics teacher and mentor is a Black American with Italian and Eritrean parents. As their multicultural backgrounds give them access to more mythological possibilities, their diversity is a strength, as it should be. – Krishni Burns

*For further information on the Our Mythical Childhood Survey, please refer to the website of the project “Our Mythical Childhood” [link: http://omc.obta.al.uw.edu.pl/], led by Prof. Katarzyna Marciniak at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw, Poland, with the participation of Bar Ilan University, University of New England, University of Roehampton, University of Yaoundé 1, and other affiliated scholars, within the funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No 681202).