Review: Oh My Gods! by Alexandra Sheppard (2019)

‘He’s like the Beyoncé of my immortal family.’ Guess the god. And which Olympian likes sauerkraut, Crocs and car boot sales ‘somewhere off the North Circular’? And who spends their days suing dodgy landlords at the local law firm?

a. Eros

b. Zeus

c. Athena

It’s been a long time since I read anything from the Young Adult section of the library, and this debut novel from Alexandra Sheppard has been refreshingly enjoyable, and thought-provoking too.

What’s it about?

15-year old Helen is a North London schoolgirl who likes Rihanna and chocolate waffles with mint chocolate ice cream. She is half Jamaican, and half Olympian: the child of Zeus and a mortal mother, recently deceased. This Helen wasn’t hatched from Leda’s egg, though. And in fact she resembles Helen of Sparta basically in name alone. This Helen takes a dim view of the beauty industry, she does her French homework on time, and is more Air Max than Alexander McQueen.

The novel follows her attempts to navigate life as a teenager and as a scion of Zeus who- along with Athena, Eros, Apollo and Aphrodite- is struggling to parent her. They all live under the same very suburban roof, pursuing ordinary careers and eschewing the tedious immortal life up on Olympus.

The plot centres around the gods’ struggle to remain concealed in plain sight among unknowing mortals. This will ring a bell with Harry Potter fans, and I’m sure I’m not the only one to see a touch of Hermione in the earnest, bookish side of Helen.

What’s it like?

Myth is fundamentally elastic, and Sheppard has great fun recasting familiar godheads in a strikingly familiar environment. Aphrodite is a make-up artist addicted to online shopping. Apollo moonlights as ‘DJ Sunny’ (@DJ_sunny), craving a fanbase to match his classical heyday.

For your pupils, these modern re-imaginings are entertaining of course. They also help to reinforce the human-like representation of the gods in many classical texts: the vanity, the caprice, the pride and the grudge-bearing.

Aphrodite makes a very convincing YouTube ‘influencer’, for instance.

Her relationship with Helen is harder to construe, however. Sheppard has gone for the older-younger sister dynamic, with Aphrodite constantly stressing her superiority and exploiting Helen as a guinea pig for her new skincare products. This Aphrodite is occasionally spiteful, but a long way from the grim Aphrodite who in Iliad 3 coerces Helen to pleasure Paris post-duel.

Choosing Helen as the protagonist was inspired. A problematic figure who represents a sort of mythical palimpsest, she carries a legacy as fought-over as any fallen Trojan or Greek warrior. Reading Sheppard’s use of Helen alongside Gorgias’ Encomium or Euripides’ Trojan Women, for instance, would generate really interesting discussion.

Especially given the semi-autobiographical characterisation in Oh My Gods! Sheppard has written much of herself into the character of Helen, as she talks about in this interview. Reclaiming Helen for herself is only part of the success of this novel. Helen, as she always has been, is a vehicle for expressing attitudes to power and gender. Sheppard is reclaiming Helen for a non-white, non-middle class readership and that is both incredibly refreshing but also important.

Antiquity today is as politicised as ever. See, for instance, Donna Zuckerberg’s eye-opening exposé of how the alt-right have been pushing distorted, white-supremacist readings of Marcus Aurelius, or Ovid. The discipline of Classics is still confronting its role in racist and sexist power structures and projects like The People’s History of Classics, based at KCL, are trying to de-toxify the field.

The subject, at both school and university, is still very white. Sheppard’s Helen is a welcome challenge to that. Her favourite food is curry goat, her afro is rarely cooperative, and she hated the summer drama course she took in Clerkenwell: ‘Everything, from my skin to my hair to what I had in my packed lunch, set me apart from the posh kids who went there.’

We tend to think of race as more an American problem than a British one. We have a more visible and entrenched class system, by comparison. Perhaps, but this is of course too simplistic: see how Aaron Banks recently tried to co-opt Roman history to serve his anti-immigration position. Mary Beard engaged with Banks sensitively and generously, but you have to ask what impact that sort of professional scrutiny can have once the initial claims have been made. The original story was published in the Daily Mail; the follow-up, with its attention to terms and nuance, came out in the Guardian…

This element of the novel is managed subtly by Sheppard. Helen is first and foremost a teenager preoccupied with fitting in, Whatsapp and getting a snog. Having taught inner-city teenagers for the best part of ten years, I can say that Sheppard has done a fine job of evoking their world. Yes, the characters’ slang jars from time to time. I’ve never heard a London teen describe their nose as a ‘schnozz’, and the reference to Abercrombie & Fitch struck me as a little ‘noughties’. But on the whole I enjoyed her writing. There are a couple of very funny moments, and some original images: ‘His words expanded like a party balloon, pushing out thoughts of anything else.’ I also learnt the word ‘glamazon’!

Would I recommend it?

I would. It probably has more appeal to girls than boys (as risky a statement as that is!) but the use of myth and the progressive intent will interest classicists of any age or inclination. It’s a cross between Harry Potter and Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison. Classics, broadly-defined, needs contributions like Sheppard’s. And teenagers always need accessible and entertaining representations of their experience. I’ll be ordering a copy to our school library, for sure.

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