Stone Blind Sour

Happy end of April everyone! I’ve had an OK reading month again. I’ve been a little slower because I read some longer books, but I’m up to 15 books so far this year, so I’m still pretty happy with that. Anyway, we’re going to get right into it this week because my month has been super boring. So, this month I’m reviewing Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes. And to accompany this month’s review I made a Stone Sour.

Stone Sour Recipe

2oz Bourbon

1oz Orange Juice

0.75oz Lemon Juice

0.75oz Simple Syrup

1 Gummy Worm*

1 Orange Wheel

*This is an optional ingredient.

In a cocktail shaker with ice, combine all liquid ingredients and shake. Then, pour into a rocks glass and garnish!

This isn’t one of my favourite cocktails I’ve ever made just because I don’t love bourbon and I just made a whiskey sour not long ago, but there’s only so many drinks in the world people. I had a really hard time thinking of a special ingredient for this novel. So, I ended up going with something a bit lazy that only kind of works, sorry. I chose gummy worms (but if you use your imagination you can pretend they’re snakes) as an optional garnish. Typically, a stone sour would have a cherry for a garnish, but I opted to swap that for gummy “snakes” to match Medusa’s hair. This obviously doesn’t change the taste of the cocktail, but they are fun to eat! So, this one maybe isn’t my most creative, but it is definitely a good one to try if you like whiskey sours.

Stone Blind Synopsis

(from book cover)

They will fear you and flee you and call you a monster. 

The only mortal in a family of gods, Medusa is the youngest of the Gorgon sisters. Unlike her siblings, Medusa grows older, experiences change, feels weakness. Her mortal lifespan gives her an urgency that her family will never know.

When the sea god Poseidon assaults Medusa in Athene’s temple, the goddess is enraged. Furious by the violation of her sacred space, Athene takes revenge—on the young woman. Punished for Poseidon’s actions, Medusa is forever transformed. Writhing snakes replace her hair and her gaze will turn any living creature to stone. Cursed with the power to destroy all she loves with one look, Medusa condemns herself to a life of solitude.

Until Perseus embarks upon a fateful quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon . . .

Review

“You are many all on your own.”

Well, our streak of high ratings has, unfortunately, ended. I really wanted to like this book. But, I went into it uncertain and cautious because the recent spread of myth reimaginings can be very hit and miss, in my opinion. And, sadly, Stone Blind just felt trite to me. But I don’t really like writing negative reviews, so let’s get this over with.

I, honestly, don’t have a lot of positives for this novel. My biggest positive would be that the writing is fine. There were some editorial errors of missing words and grammar mistakes, but I won’t fault the author for that. But again, the writing was just fine. I think the writing style matched the story well, it just wasn’t extremely well done. And I want to say that I do typically like this style of writing—multiple POVs, whimsical and strange, an almost poetic and rhythmic feel. I actually often praise this style in other novels, but it really didn’t work for me in this one. Instead of poetic and whimsical it felt repetitive and forced. Almost like it wanted to sound like a classic Greek tragedy and fell short. But I am still giving Stone Blind positive points for the style matching the feel of the book.

A big note for me in this novel was how forced it felt. Looking through my notes, I wrote “forced” multiple times in regard to different things. Maybe I was in a nit-picky mood when I read this book, but it really did seem like the author was trying too hard to be modern, unique, feminist, and deep. And this is kind of mean to say, but I actually rolled my eyes multiple times while reading this book because it was SO pushy. It felt almost, and this is weird to say, too feminist. Don’t get me wrong, I respect feminism, but the pushiness of the feminism came off extremely cringe-y and actually undercut the deeper impact it could’ve had.

On the same note as feeling forced, the dialogue was stilted and awkward. A lot of what the characters say doesn’t seem to match their personalities at all. And, honestly, almost every character sounded pretty much the same to me. I couldn’t pick one character that stood out for having a unique voice. And along with that, the characters were 2-dimensional at best. They weren’t fleshed out, had no depth, and pretty much just matched what we knew already from the original myths. It was really quite disappointing actually since I love classic mythology and was looking forward to seeing some more character development there.

And with that being said, I didn’t feel like this was a retelling of the Medusa story. It was pretty much just telling the regular story of Perseus and Medusa with a teeny tiny bit of Medusa’s perspective added in. And I mean teeny tiny… I would say maybe 1/3 of the book had Medusa in at all and that’s being generous. She felt like a side character in a book that made it seem like she would be the main character. If anything, Athene was the main character. But beyond that, even when we do see Medusa’s perspective it’s again 2-dimensional and adds no real substance to her character for me. Also the (sorry for my language Grammie) shitting on Perseus chapters were, frankly, kind of dumb. It sounded like a 16-year-old complaining about an ex-boyfriend.

On top of the story being trite, confusing, and not what it seemed like it would be, it was also choppy. And while sometimes it flowed well, it largely was all over the place. This choppiness added to the confusion and the feeling that this wasn’t Medusa’s story because a lot of the things we were seeing literally didn’t have anything to do with her or overly matter to her story. So, overall it was just a bit too all over the place for me and lacked cohesion. But maybe all these complaints are because Stone Blind was apparently supposed to be funny and maybe I just didn’t understand the humour since I did not get a comedy vibe, but who knows. OK that’s it, that’s as mean as I can be without feeling too bad about it because it’s my honest opinion.

So, I feel bad that I don’t have more positive things to say about Stone Blind. But the characters lacked depth, the dialogue was awkward, and the story didn’t flow. I do appreciate where the author was coming from and what they were trying to accomplish with this novel, I just don’t think it was executed as well as it could have been. I also think that the cover, synopsis, and title are kind of misleading when the story is barely about Medusa. So overall, I would not recommend this book. If you think you might like it, absolutely go ahead as my opinion is mine alone and obviously very subjective, so you never know how you could feel about it. The cocktail is definitely worth trying if you like bourbon and whiskey sours, but also to each their own.

My Rating:

Thanks for reading! And, if you read the book or try the cocktail let me know in a comment or on Instagram. Also, if you haven’t yet read my previous reviews, I recommend reading Klara and the Italian Sun and Sea of Tranquility if you liked this one!

Teghann

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