With this responsibility and acknowledgment of Persephone’s rape, Tan creates a much harder path for her characters towards a reconciliation and a happy ending. Yes, there’s pleasure, but it doesn’t reduce the trauma. With unflinching honesty, it portrays the wedding night as the nonconsensual claiming of an unwilling bride. I was less repelled by it than I could have been, in large part thanks to the writing. Their wedding night isn’t anywhere near consensual, and yet… Persephone suffers quite a lot throughout this story, at the hands of her mother as well as at those of her abductor Hades, who snatches her up after Demeter casts her out and carries her off to the underworld, where she holds her captive and forces her into marriage. First, this book comes with content warnings, and plenty: there’s nonconsensual/dubious consensual content and physical and emotional abuse.
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