Queen of the Gods by Katharine and Elizabeth Corr
Katharine and Elizabeth Corr share their passion for books in their guest blog today. Sisters and authors, they have written about their favourite books growing up and they encourage us to write down and take note of our own favourites!
We are both hoarders. One of us is worse than the other, but we both have a deep dislike of getting rid of anything if we’re not forced to. Partly, this is the result of growing up with our Nana’s mantra of ‘it might come in useful one day’, which she applied to everything from left over swathes of fabric to bits of cardboard and rubber bands. (Nana was into recycling before there was even a word for it.) Partly, it’s due to our mum’s mental health issues. One of the ways she tried to control her environment – to create order out of what felt to her like chaos – was to throw things out, sell them, or give them away. We lost quite a few toys like that. And, more’s the pity, quite a few books.
However, our mum also shared her love of reading with us, and one of the great things about the books you read as a child, as everyone knows, is the way they stay with you. You keep a copy in your memory even if you no longer own a physical version – the way we both recall favourite library books from our childhood is a great example of this. And it’s true, too, of books that introduced us to the Greek myths. We can both still remember lying in bed reading the tattered copy of Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes that had belonged to our mum (and most likely our aunt too), its dust jacket long gone. This was our first introduction to the stories of Perseus, Theseus, and the Argonauts. Or Kingsley’s version of those stories, at least – it wasn’t until much later we realised there were other versions of these myths in existence. Later still that we thought about how such myths might be retold from different perspectives.
Another favourite was Gods, Men & Monsters, written by Michael Gibson and wonderfully illustrated by Giovanni Caselli. We both ended up buying second-hand copies of this book as adults just so we could drool over those pictures again. There was also, at one point, an old Penguin paperback of Ovid’s Metamorphosis; we both remember flicking through and reading the story of Daphne, transformed into a tree as a way of escaping Apollo. Even as kids we knew the gods were awful.
Of course, books weren’t the only way we absorbed classical mythology. We both sat through many episodes of the 1970s Wonder Woman tv show, our first introduction (albeit very tangentially) to the Amazons. We also loved Ulysses 31, the cartoon series inspired by the Odyssey but set in space, and we have fond memories of watching the stop-motion animation of the 1981 version of Clash Of The Titans (though it left us none the wiser as to who the Titans actually were).
Dodgy plasticine sea-monsters aside, the books, tv and films of our childhood did something. Our fascination with mythology translated into study at A level and beyond: classical civilisation, ancient history, ancient Greek, Latin. And – many, many years later – it’s translated into two books. Set partly in an alternative ancient Greece that survived the Bronze age collapse, partly in the realms of the gods, the HOUSE OF SHADOWS duology has so many elements from those remembered childhood favourites and from our later studies. Travels through the Underworld. Dangerous sea voyages. Family curses. Gods interfering in mortal lives. And, of course, heroes – though we’d like to think that our heroes are a little more relatable than the version presented in that battered, hand-me-down volume of Charles Kingsley.
Still, we hope that little book, wherever it ended up, might still be inspiring other readers. And if you remember some stories you loved from your childhood, why not make a note of them? As our nana would say, they might come in handy one day. You might be able to write them into a story of your own.