A Fan Playlist for Hekate
In case you missed it, I’m obsessed with Hekate! This book in verse is so full of incredible poetry and a plot that just pulls you along! I truly can’t describe the experience of reading it – it was like being lulled by the most meditative poems but also being captured by a story that I just couldn’t put down. So OF COURSE I’m making a playlist for this book! Listen to this while you read Hekate, or on a blustery autumn day when you want to lean into your witchy, underworld side!
Hekate sings the story of its eponymous heroine. Born into a world on fire and at war, she and her mother are left behind by the menfolk of their Titan family as the battle against the new Gods—the Olympians—begins. Soon, Hekate and her mother are forced to flee their home as the Olympians overpower and enslave the Titans, including Hekate’s father, Perses, and gain dominion over the universe. In a bid to protect Hekate from the clutches of Zeus and Poseidon, her mother leaves her in the underworld with the goddess Styx and king of the underworld, Hades, where she must make a life for herself and discover her divine purpose.
Here begins Nikita Gill’s beautiful and propulsive reimagining of Hekate’s myth which unfolds into a coming-of-age adventure story and quest in which our young protagonist—not yet a goddess—sets out to discover what has happened to her parents, heal from the trauma of her separation from them, make a new home for herself in the underworld, and, eventually, step into her true power as a woman and goddess, before it’s too late.
Beginning a generation before Hekate, Styx sings the story of the goddess of the underworld river that bears her name. The firstborn child of Titans, Styx is revered as the first of her kind— until she is eclipsed and forgotten amid her scores of siblings, the Oceanids and the Potamoi.
Coming of age in a world simmering with paranoia and unspoken fear of Kronos, the volatile and unchecked god-king, Styx learns to conceal the rage ignited by her growing disillusionment with her parents and her vain and unkind siblings. Instead, she finds solace and sisterhood in her cousin, Asteria. Together, they train in the arts of creation and magic. And as they seek to learn their divine purpose and their place within the Titanomachy, they discover both the joy sparked by true love and the fierce resilience birthed from motherhood.
In this fierce and heartrending tale of sisterhood, identity, love, and war, Styx must carve her own path to womanhood— and ultimately, godhood.