The Art of Peeling an Orange by Victoria Avilan

I'm pretty sure that's not a thing? I mean, outside of Daredevil. It's things like the fabulous artist, Anna Garibaldi, turns out to be losing her sight, although her other senses have sharpened to compensate which is why she's able to conceal the fact she's mostly blind from the world. It genuinely kept me reading, and even though I was aware it was evoking the themes of Greek myths, it also left me troubled. There's art and fires and obsessions and steep staircases cut into cliffs. What I did like was the thriller-ish set up (the heroine's fiance leaves her to have an affair with a fabulous artist, and is mysteriously killed in a car crash), the unfolding mysteries surrounding the characters, and the very gothic flavour of the narrative.

But I felt largely out of lane on all of it because the heroine is a queer Jewish woman. This might be a 'it's not you, it's me' type situation but there was a lot here that just. I think I must have got this free from somewhere because I couldn't remember ever buying it - probably making me a totally non-ideal audience for the book. You say goodbye to life as you know it and take a breathless ride down to the depths of the Land of the Dead, to where passions and dangers await you and nothing is as it seems. Where do you go from here for solace, for justice? If you are Carly Rosen, a portrait artist with huge imagination, you use your art to charm your way into the life and inner circle of the alluring Anna Garibaldi, whose seductive and secretive underworld is nothing you could have expected. To add insult to injury, the one who has abandoned you dies unexpectedly, having left you a cryptic text message suggesting that you were always the one and only. What do you do when the love of your life has eloped with another woman on the eve of your wedding? The other woman is a famous beauty named Anna Garibaldi, and their love story is splashed all over the tabloids, making you die inside.

This gender-bending risqué retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in sizzling West Hollywood, echoes the ancient story of the lovers in the Underworld. When Carly Rosen is jilted on the eve of her wedding, she embarks on a startling journey of self-discovery.

The Art of Peeling an Orange by Victoria Avilan