The Palace of Eros

Caro De Robertis
Completed 8/6/2025, Reviewed 8/6/2025
5 stars

This sapphic and trans retelling of the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros was a tour de force of feminist and sexual liberation.  Scouring the reviews online, this book received a varied mix of love and disappointment, mostly because of the prose.  It’s very flowery prose.  At times it feels stream of consciousness, filling up the scant plot with tons and tons of pretty sentences over-describing the thoughts going through Psyche’s head at any point in the story.  I found it annoying at first but quickly came to appreciate and eventually drown in the sensuousness of the prose.  I love good prose but sometimes it can get annoying and cloying.   Here, I reveled in it.  It made the passionate scenes between Psyche and Eros real and erotic while almost never mentioning body parts.  This book was nominated for a 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Speculative Fiction.  Making a guess based on reading so many of the winners and nominees over the life of the Award, I would place bets that this is the one to beat.

The story begins with Psyche bemoaning the efforts her father makes to find husbands for his three daughters.  When word spreads of her astounding beauty, men come from all over to gaze at and lust over her.  This soon seems like a curse, with her sisters becoming resentful and jealous over the attention she gets and Psyche herself feeling used and emotionally abused.  Combined with a summer drought before the normally dry fall and winter plus his lack of sons, the father believes this to be a curse upon his house.  He goes to an oracle who cryptically says that Psyche must be delivered to a monstrous husband to remove the curse.  Bound to a rock on a cliff, she is left for this fate, only to be saved by the goddess Eros.  She takes Psyche to palace made especially for her and offers herself to her, practically worshipping at Psyche’s feet.  Eventually, Psyche comes to agree to this and is awakened to pleasures she never knew existed and thoughts about womanhood she never dared allow herself to consider.  However, they must hide their relationship from the gods of Olympus, especially Eros’ mother Aphrodite, as the pantheon is just as misogynistic as the parochial humans.  For Eros is a goddess who can present as either a woman, a man, or a combination of both.    

This book is really a masterful thesis on self-discovery, self-acceptance, and what it means for a woman to be free in society.  Psyche’s sisters’ marriages illustrate all the negativity towards women having their own lives and being chattel of men.  The relationship between Psyche and Eros provides an ideal alternative to that, where Eros does everything possible for Psyche to let her be free to choose her own destiny.  However, this freedom soon has a cost as Psyche realizes that the Eden Eros has provided is also a cage.  Eros only visits her at night and does not allow her to see her face.  If Psyche discovers her true identity, the gods will see them and will bring down their wrath on them, especially Aphrodite.  This is analogous to the hiding queer and trans people have had to enforce upon themselves to keep from being ostracized.  Psyche wants to reject this cage now that she has been empowered to be true to herself.  

The sensuousness of Psyche and Eros’ relationship is a force to be reconned with.  At first, I thought I’d have trouble appreciating it, being a gay man.  But the prose is what did it for me.  It was so beautiful, illustrating all the highs and lows of an almost obsessive relationship between the god of erotic love and a naïve but highly intelligent young woman.  The book alternates between a first person narration by Psyche and a third person perspective of Eros and her experiences as the winged goddess known to the Romans as Cupid, with her mother, and with the petty, lewd, and jealous Zeus.  This gives us amazing insight into both main characters.  I was blown away by how much I came to empathize with both of them, despite their idealism and their faults.  I really didn’t know this story from my own experiences with Greek mythology, but it didn’t stop me from getting completely immersed in their relationship.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  I know it’s not for everyone.  People averse to lengthy prose may find this book intolerable.  Others will say it is too erotic, though from my limited experience, this is more like the sensuousness of the writings of Anaïs Nin as opposed to the romantasy that is being published today.  I think it is a glorious exploration of personhood for queer and trans people as represented by Psyche and Eros, respectively.  It speaks to oppression, self-destructiveness, and eventual true freedom of being one’s authentic self.