cut-tooth
Told from the perspective of Finn, a half-dead Mancunian teen who works as an apprentice on the famed River Styx, the book celebrates reinvention and the notion of defining and defying fate. When Orpheus of Thrace -- legendary, beautiful, and impossibly doomed -- arrives in the underworld, his saga is already established, his failure predestined -- until he meets Finn, living among the dead. Finn feels as though his semi-existence is pointless -- does anyone even miss him, now he's gone? When Finley's guardian, the reaper Post, loses her skull to the Confluence of Hades, he and Orpheus descend side by side through a dozen depictions of the afterlife, each in pursuit of a loved one. Their partnership can't help but shift the fate a thousand stories have sealed them in: Orpheus as a tragic hero, and Finn as a supposed "no one", a sick queer kid who has often seen himself as worthless, and Eurydice as a voiceless entity (she's nothing of the sort). As they descend, the teens rescript the concept of destiny -- the Furies be damned.