I’m not sure where I first heard about Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips, but chances are it was was a book blog somewhere out there. Anyway,  a copy came in with a batch of new books and I was the first one to check it out. The novel takes place in modern-day London, where the Roman gods are living in squalor, trying to hold onto what little powers they have left. Apollo, struck by one of Eros’ love arrows, pursues Alice, a mild-mannered cleaning woman, while her equally mild-mannered friend, Neil, tries to work up the courage to declare his own love for her. As the two mortals find themselves caught up in the age-old games of the gods, they must rise to the challenge of nothing less than saving each other and their world.

Gods Behaving Badly is a romantic comedy, funny and silly. If it’s possible for a book to be both vulgar and sweet, then this one is it, a fun summer book that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

I bought a copy of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill at a used book sale a couple years ago purely because of its title. And then it sat on my shelf, ignored until I signed up for Maggie’s Southern Reading Challenge and was browsing my LibraryThing catalog, looking for appropriate books. In Sherrill’s unconventional novel, the Minotaur has settled in a small town in North Carolina, so I decided now was a fine time to find out exactly what the Minotaur has been up to the last few thousand years. M, as he is now called, is living in a small trailer park and working as a line cook in a steakhouse. He leads a solitary and lonely existence. As he searches for human connection, the Minotaur becomes something the ancients would never have imagined – a sympathetic, likable character, charming despite his social awkwardness.

For at least the first third of the novel, I kept wondering whether the Minotaur appeared as a half-bull to everyone, or if some alchemy had been performed so that his otherness wasn’t apparent to anyone but himself. But no, he does have the appearance of a bull, at least from the chest up, complete with sleek black hair and horns. Part of the beauty of this unusual novel is that the idea of a half-man, half-bull walking around in the modern day South isn’t ludicrous, but rather just a bit of magic in an ordinary world.