For fans of: Circe, They Never Learn
Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌘
Genre: Historical Fantasy
Violence: 🪓🪓🪓
Spice: 🔥🔥🔥
TW: rape, racism, sexism, homophobia, miscarriage, cannibalism

One expects a mythology-inspired story to be lyrical, and Ives delivers, her language unfurling like an exquisite flower. She matches it with an innovative plot, juxtaposing the Sirens’ imagined backstory with the mystery surrounding the lost colony of Roanoke. The result blends soul-searing sapphic love & female rage. Myths are rife with episodes of females mistreated at the hands of males, be they god or man. Their fiction mirrors the real world of Roanoke’s women. They exist as extensions of the men—be they cowed wife, reluctant fiancée, or terrorized drudge. Women are the weaker sex, ill-equipped to rule or fight, in need of protection. One need only seek the Bible’s guidance to confirm it. Yet those who propagate such myth, who elect themselves to do the protecting, are the ones guilty of the violations, the indignities visited upon the women tacitly accepted by the supposedly God-fearing. But the women of Those Fatal Flowers dance with agency under Ives’s pen, burning with acts of defiance, large and small. Yet this is both a satisfying story of revenge and a message of hope. Men are not all bad, just as women are not all good. And evil is made, not born. Ives gives us the satisfaction of seeing the wicked punished along with the reminder to avoid the pitfall of stereotyping. If you enjoy mythology, historical fiction, feminist lit, or just really good story telling, this book is for you.


Thank you to Random House & NetGalley for a gifted copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What happens when you mix a mystery from America’s history with mythology, feminist rage, and romance?

This book right here.

It presents an interesting case: what if sirens from Greco-Roman mythology were responsible for the disappearance of the inhabitants of the lost colony of Roanoke The author explains that her aim with this story was to explore the effects of loss and guilt on the psyche while also examining structural violence. It does a fair job in this endeavor, while also including a sapphic romance story.

Our main character is Thelia, one of three sisters who acted as handmaidens to Proserpina (Persephone), and who were transformed into winged creatures to assist in the search for their charge when she gets abducted by Dis (Hades). When they fail to find and rescue the goddess, they are imprisoned on an island as punishment. There, they lure sailors with their singing. (This book alternately refers to them as harpies and sirens, but I think the singing and luring part indicates they were just sirens, not harpies?)

After centuries have gone by, Thelia learns there may be a way to lift the curse she and her sisters are under, but it requires the sacrifice of many treacherous men…something the English colony of Roanoke in the Americas has more then a few of.

I liked the unique premise of the story and the bits detailing the lives of Thelia and her sister sirens on the island of Scopuli, and the writing on the sentence level was good.

On the other hand, I questioned the reliability of the behavior and speech of the Puritans depicted here. The men and women of Raleigh drank an awful lot of alcohol in this book, and said things like, “Fun little secret for you, my lady” before revealing some bit of gossip. I’m no scholar of history, but these things didn’t seem right to me. And I just wasn’t much feeling the romance — it was a bit of instalove on Thelia’s side (although in part because the object of her affections apparently looks so much like her long lost love that for a time she is trying to determine if it might actually BE her), and also if you are on a timed mission for redemption, shouldn’t a centuries old divinity be able to keep it in her skirts?

All the hate for anything male really bothered me, BUT this does get addressed later on in the book, as Thelia finally learns that “monsters are made, not born”.

So while this book wasn’t a home run for me, it was decent and presents some intriguing concepts. If I were allowed half or even quarter star ratings, I’d say this was a 3.25 or 3.5 read for me.

Thank you the NetGalley and Dell/Ballantine and Penguin Random House for the eARC in exchange for my honest review! I plan on posting my review to my blog at jessicacrawfordwrites.com on January 7th, 2025, and to me Instagram account @shelfesteem101 around that same time.

This was a very different and interesting pick for me because I had never read anything like this. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for letting me read an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
I enjoyed the mythological aspects of this book and how it goes from past to present day.
I couldn’t put the book down once I started it!
4/5 stars

The VIbes:

—Proserpina

—sirens

—.... the Roanoke colony...?

The Basics:

After losing her beloved Proserpina, handmaiden Thelia is cursed to live as a siren on the island of Scopuli... until she makes a terrible sacrifice, renewing her human body and ending up, long story short, within the Roanoke colony. Wherein lies a woman who looks just like Prosperina.

The Review:

I will admit... I perhaps should have thought better of picking this up, because Roanoke is, after all, right in the name. The weirdness of the concept combined with the fact that it's sapphic, however, sort of overrode any questions I should've had

Like many people who enjoy a Mystery, I've done some research on what happened at Roanoke, and the thing is... Even if the theory that seems to be the most likely (the colonizers left behind during that supply run were largely absorbed into the Croatan community nearby) isn't true, it's kind of difficult to tell a story about Roanoke without involving... you know... the indigenous people already living there. (How ever much American history textbooks may try in the coming years, who knows.)

Shannon Ives takes the "it's not my story to tell" route with her explanation for why the Croatan people bear basically zero true presence in this book... And? Maybe it isn't. It's really not for me to say.

But if it isn't, just don't use the Roanoke colony as the backdrop for this book. As a feminist woman who feels a lot of rage, I get the sense that "female rage" has basically become a marketing tool that negates speaking on any problems with the material, particularly when those issues pertain to people of color. Which... is a pretty big problem, in my opinion.

Otherwise, I found the prose at times pretty and at times "this is the house Madeline Miller built", and the romance wasn't especially compelling. But I may have been distracted by how much the bigger issue irritated me. Maybe this would've worked—without, you know, the whole "I chose the Roanoke colony as a backdrop without wanting to engage with it" thing.

With all that in mind, I'm just not into this.

Thanks to NetGalley and Dell for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

The premise was really interesting and I was ready for some sapphic romance, but there were aspects of the book that stopped me from fully enjoying it. It took Thelia so long to realize that gender is not the problem, she hated her baby the minute she found out it was a boy. Her justification was that was males were inherently evil and monsters. It took the ghost of the baby’s dad to come tell her that monsters are not born but made for her to understand this. She was shown this since she landed into this place. Thomas’s mom being the calculated, manipulative mess that she was wasn’t enough to convince her that anyone can be a monster despite their gender. I would get into the story and then Thelia would look at a child and because he was a boy she would wonder when he would become evil. It took me out of the story, and when I realized that the author took a real life event of a settler colony and the genocide of native Americans I was so confused as why she would do that. This was suppose to be a sapphic story within Greco-Roman mythology she did not need to add any of that. Thank you NetGalley for the arc.

This story takes us back to the Roanoke Colony in the late 1500s and gives us an intriguing twist incorporating Greek mythology.

The book has two timelines: with the Roanoke Colony and a thousand years prior to the time. That's when Thelia lived with her sisters on a small rocky Greek island called Scopuli. They were banished to this place and later, a radical change happened. Thelia was discovered on a beach in Virginia with valuable treasures. The locals saw her as a beautiful princess and to her advantage, she was welcomed with open arms.

The author had a lot of imagination to put these two timelines together with all sorts of layers and parts with ghastly violence. I am not as familiar with Greek mythology and found the first part to be slow trying to put the pieces together. The last half was quicker but by that time, I wasn't as engaged. However, I admire the author’s spirit for creative writing in a magical world.

My thanks to Dell and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this book with an expected release date of January 21, 2025.

“These Fatal Flowers” connects two unrelated stories: the tale of Hades and Persephone, and the disappearance of the Roanoke colony. Thelia was a nymph charged to accompany Proserpina by her mother Ceres. Thelia and Proserpina fall in love, and when Proserpina is taken by Dis, Ceres punishes Thelia and the other nymphs by transforming them into the Sirens. Over the centuries they waste away as they bring in fewer and fewer ships of sailors on which to feast, all while trying to provide an impressive enough sacrifice to Ceres to convince her to lift their punishment. Thelia arrives at Roanoke and crafts a plan to lure all the settlers to the Sirens’ island, but along the way finds herself falling for a local woman and experiencing conflict about her ongoing love for Proserpina.
I thought the concept of this novel was extremely original and I was very excited to read it, but I think it just ended up being fine. Thelia wasn’t as complex a character as I would have hoped given the plot. I really disliked most of the Roanoke storyline and I didn’t really buy Thelia’s romance with Cora. There were elements of a good story, but they didn’t really come together very well.

An enchanting sequel to the legend of Persephone, a story of love, revenge, and greed, but always love. Though it would have been nicer to use the Greek names rather than the Roman ones, but it doesn’t take away from the enchantment.

I received this book as an Advanced Readers copy in exchange for an honest review. Thank you so much to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for this opportunity.
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I really wanted to love this book.
The mix of Greek mythology and Roanoke sounded like it would be a perfect balance of ancient and modern, but I think what ended up happening is both settings were overly saturated with information that I couldn't seem to place in the puzzle I was trying to put together as I read this book.

In the Greek retelling, you have a woman being punished for losing her lover and then being damned to an island where she actively hunts those that wash upon the island shores. In the Roanoke world, the same character seems timid and weak (which a lot of this has to do with adjusting to the colonies) but I didn't think the two versions of the same character made any sense to me. She seemed to be most herself when she was on the island, but at the same time was only looking to escape the island and I didn't understand that aspect of her.

Overall, I think the details of both worlds seemed to overpower the connection between the characters and locations and situations that could have grown the characters. There was so much emphasis on little things that I lost the overarching theme and was left with too many small details to focus on which left me very very lost and distracted and unconnected to the themes and character.
I also really struggle with how I was supposed to connect the two versions of Thalia that I was learning about. Neither the Greek version or the Roanoke version felt truly authentic and there was a constant longing in her that didn't seem filled through this book. I suppose that could have been the point, but it didn't feel like it ever concluded or had a real closing for me, so unfortunately, I struggled with this book.

I was excited to read a book combining Greco-Roman mythology and the lose colony of Roanoke - but this book did not do either aspect well, and chose to sidestep the difficult questions of colonization that are central to any inclusion of settlers in America.

Thelia, one of three sisters who are handmaidens to Proserpina (Persephone) is in love with the goddess, but is punished along with her sisters when Dis (Hades) takes Proserpina away. Banished to an island and destined to lure men to their deaths, Thelia finally finds a way to free herself and it involves going to the new colony of Roanoke.

I found the first part of the book to drag - maybe some editing to make it tighter would have helped, but the issues I had with the Roanoke part of the story were because of the choices made by the author. The reasoning that not including the problems with colonization or racial violence were made because it wasn't "her story to tell" are puzzling, because does it mean that goddesses and sirens ARE her story to tell?

To anger a goddess is to incur her wrath - and to be responsible for the loss of her child, even worse. Thelia and her sisters were handmaidens to the young goddess of spring, Proserpina, up until the day the underworld stole her away. Her mother, in a rage of grief, banishes them for losing her daughter to the island of Scopuli. Along with banishment, she curses Thelia and her sisters to live as sirens, and so long as they have ships of men to sing to their deaths, they manage to survive. But over the years, these ships come fewer and fewer until they are at risk of dying until a well placed sacrifice shows the way. Thelia must venture out to another land and bring back more sacrifices, so that she and her sisters will finally be free of the curse bestowed upon them.

This book was certainly an interesting concept. It mixed mythology with colonialism, of all things (she ends up in the colony of Roanoke). It’s full of men you want to hate and sure to encite your feminist rage. I did find some parts slower than others, yet a well placed comment about the uselessness of men would perk my interest back up. Add in budding romance and you’ve got yourself one great book.

Recommended if you like: mythology, feminism, lgbt+, genre mashups

I really wanted to love this book. Both topics are an interest to me. Greek mythology plus the lost colony of Roanoke? Please say less. Couldn't we all use some female rage right about now? Absolutely. Should have been a winner.

However, I couldn't get into the story. I couldn't connect to the characters and honestly, I think I got lost early on as to why everything was happening the way it was.

I will not be posting on Goodreads, Instagram, etc because I don't want to hurt the author's ratings. Just because this book wasn't for me doesn't mean it won't resonate with someone else.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t really a fan of how the representation of Indigenous people was handled in this book. On paper, the idea for this book absolutely peaked my interest but I found myself kinda put-off by the centering of whiteness when the treatment of Indigenous Americans back then is still felt tremendously today. I do appreciate that more and more sapphic stories are being told! Thank you for the ARC!

Thank you to Netgalley and Dell for providing me a free e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
I’ve read many mythology retellings, and they tend to either be set in ye olden Classical days or present day New York. Those Fatal Flowers is different, and really plays with the idea of how strange immortality would be, and chooses to mix Roman myth with the lost colony of Roanoke. The title comes from a passage of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and our story follows Thelia, a handmaiden of Proserpina’s who along with her sisters gets cursed into becoming the mythological sirens. I thoroughly enjoyed the complicated look at deconstructing Colonialism, and think Ives handled it in a very respectful way. The feminist themes were very strong, and I like that by the end it was clear morality is not black and white. The exception goes to Thomas, who was a bit of a Disney villain. Thelia is a strong protagonist, and I enjoyed the story through her perspective. The romance was there, don’t get me wrong, but I thought it would’ve been more prominent. Totally okay with the amount we got though. Also, the prose was excellent. A lot of great lines I will be annotating when I order the physical copy come January. Overall, an incredibly strong debut novel. Five stars.

Thank you NetGalley and publishers for an advanced readers copy of this book!
I tried so hard to get into this book. Based on the description and on the plot, this is one I should have really jived with. I’m thinking this is just another victim of my reading slump- there’s nothing I can pin point specifically as to why I didn’t love it like I expected.

I have tried time and time again to get into this book and it just isn't grabbing me. Based on the synopsis I thought I would love it, but I have to DNF for now. I am sure there are many readers that will love this one, but sadly it was not for me.

Book: Those Fatal Flowers
Author: Shannon Ives
Rating: 3 Out of 5 Stars

I want to thank the publisher, Dell, for sending me an ARC. This is just another middle-of-the-road book for me. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it. I don’t have strong feelings about it either way.

In this one, we follow Thelia, who still pays the price for the mistake she made years ago. She fell in love with the wrong woman. Why is this such a big deal? Thelia and her handmaidens are supposed to be grauding the goddess of spring. Now, they are kicked out and forced to lore sailors to their deaths. Hopefully, this will put them back in the gods' favour again. However, the ships stop coming and soon Thelia wonders if they will ever get out of this exile. After following her lover’s voice, Thelia finds herself in colonial America. Now, she must figure out who to live amongst these strange creatures. To make it even worse, she finds herself drawn to one of them.

I am starting to think that I need a break from Greek mythology/retellings. This also has some Roman elements in it. I have been rating them low and I don’t get it. I did enjoy the setup of this one a lot, but the more I read, the more I found myself losing interest in it. A lot of it comes back to the fact that some things made it difficult to find this story believable. Now, I know this is fantasy, but even fantasy has rules. We have the mystery of the Roanoke colony, which was good, but some things just did not fit.

The mixing of Greek and Roman lore worked until it didn’t. The mixture makes it difficult to remember what lore is. You have to have some knowledge of them to follow this story. Then, the colonists' behavouir did not make sense. They are supposed to be a holy people, but their actions did not reflect that. Yes, I know not all from this time were saints, but still. They did not act like the people they were supposed to be. The lack of Native Americans also took away from the story. I know the author said it was because it wasn’t her story to tell. However, given that interactions between Native Americans and colonists impacted history, it seems almost wrong not to have them there. Plus, one of the legends surrounding the disappearance of the Roanoke colony is that they went with a local Native American tribe….It just didn’t seem right.

Thelia was an interesting character to follow. I liked how everything she did was to better her life and the lives of her handmaids. I also liked how she questioned everything and asked a lot of questions even though it made it clear that she was not one of them. Her rage-fueled and drove the story. However, as the story went on, I did find myself losing interest in her character. I don’t know why, but it just felt like something was missing from her character.

Overall, this wasn’t the book for me.

This book comes out on January 21, 2025.

I loved this book! Totally original concept, and great character development. I loved the focus on characters from Greek mythology that aren’t the “popular” ones. Highly recommend!

Such an interesting read. I have just enjoyed every page of this and am hopeful to read more from this author as soon as possible.

I tried to get into this book, but it just wasn't for me. I ended up not finishing the book. Not to say I won't enjoy other books from this author.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.