Book Review: ‘No Season but the Summer’ by Matilda Leyser

Author: Matilda Leyser
Title: No Season but the Summer
Release Date: 13th April 2023
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Summary

Every year for 9000 years, Persephone has descended beneath the earth to visit her husband, Hades, and leave her mother Demeter and the world to turn to winter. But the world is changing, the gods’ powers are waning, and the forest bordering Persephone’s childhood home is at risk of being felled to make way for a new road. This Spring, Persephone emerges to a different season, a different world, and a mother who seems to be in denial about it all.

Mythic Context

Hades abducts Persephone. Demeter searches for her, her grief so intense that it plunges the world into a famine that almost destroys every living creature in existence. A deal is struck: Demeter will have Persephone for six months of the year, and Hades for the remaining six. Thus, the seasons.

In retellings of this myth - which first appears in the (Homeric) Hymn to Demeter and later in Ovid’s Metamorphoses - there is often a focus on Persephone’s relationship with Hades: did she go to him willingly, or was she raped? Does she love Hades? Does she enjoy ruling as Queen of the Underworld, or does she resent being taken away from the light and the living? These questions, and that relationship, often come at the expense of the mother-daughter relationship at the heart of the ancient myth, and even of Demeter as a character in her own right, the powerful, almost primordial goddess who rages and holds the world to ransom until she is reunited with her daughter.

No Season but the Summer does not set Demeter aside. In this retelling, Demeter and Persephone and their complex, difficult, often strained relationship is right at the heart of the story. This is a story about a mother and a daughter trying to understand each other, trying to negotiate and renegotiate their changing relationship as each of them ages, and trying to articulate how much they care about one another.

Review

I’m struggling with where to start with this review. I haven’t cried this much while reading a book for a very long time. Leyser’s prose is beautiful. The setting feels present, alive. The characters - especially Demeter and Persephone - feel so raw, so honest, so real. There is something very true about their relationship, about the way they pull away from each other, resent each other’s decisions and abilities, struggle to express how deeply and unconditionally they love each other.

The gods age slowly: Persephone has been married to Hades for 9000 years but above ground, with Demeter, she often acts like a child - as I suspect many of us do when we visit the family home as adults. Persephone is a young woman desperately trying to find herself and her place in the world - something, somewhere, that isn’t Demeter’s or Hades’ but her own.

And Demeter, as a mother consumed with guilt for losing her child once before, feels equally real. She loves Persephone so deeply and so intensely that inevitably ends up pushing her away more often than not. Mother and daughter are two very different people, with different personalities and different skills and at times, they misunderstand each other and resent each other for it.

It’s lovely to follow Persephone as she grows as a woman, as she realises that she can make her own choices, stand her ground, learn who she is, advocate for herself - and learn to love the land and the environment she grew up in in a different but equally valid way to her mother.

The modern setting, with the background of climate change and ecological disaster, feels so perfect for this story, for Demeter and Persephone. There are hints early on that the world is changing and that the gods, including Demeter, are losing their powers and their influence. Persephone befriends a group of local activists and gets her first taste of freedom, but the treat of Hades always looms large.

Leyser’s Hades is unlike any other Hades that I know. He’s small, sharp, creative. He’s jealous and cruel and deeply, deeply lonely. He loves Penelope with an intensity matched only by Demeter. When he takes Penelope below the ground, to the Underworld, it’s terrifying to read, claustrophobic to the extreme. I almost had to stop reading, but couldn’t.

There are some truly shocking scenes in this story - warning for eating disorders, sexual violence, and domestic abuse - and along with Persephone’s sickening claustrophobic final ascent from the Underworld, Zeus’s transformation back out of the swan will haunt my nightmares for a very long time. But there is so much beauty in here, too. Make sure you grab a fresh highlighter because you will want to highlight so many lines! Leyser’s prose is so well-crafted, every single word seems so deliberately and so perfectly chosen, it’s honestly just exquisite. I can’t wait to read more of her work!