Donald Maass Literary Agency

Library Journal: Lakshminarayan’s sequel to Interstellar Megachef is a compelling story of culinary delights, planetary xenophobia, and being true to oneself…. Readers will devour this novel, with its multiple points of view, sharp writing, and a constant pace, plus a slow-burn romance.

Shelf Awareness: Even in Tartarus, the great labyrinth builder reckons with the death of his son and confronts his failures as a father and a man in Seamus Sullivan’s debut novella, Daedalus Is Dead.

Daedalus’s son, Icarus, famously flew too close to the sun with the wings his father built for the two of them to escape from King Minos. The wax melted, and Icarus crashed into the sea and died. Years after escaping, building a monument to his son, and trying and failing to find any trace of Minos’s daughter Ariadne, Daedalus dies of an infection. But King Minos, now also dead, judges the souls in the underworld, and even though Persephone herself takes Daedalus into her service, Minos will not allow him to see his son again. What’s more, the Minotaur runs loose in Tartarus, devouring the spirits of heroes. But as Daedalus encounters people from his life, he realizes the stories he told himself about his actions don’t always match the perceptions of others.

This nonchronological telling of events flits between Daedalus’s time in the underworld and his memories of Icarus’s childhood and their eventual flight from Crete. Sullivan heart-wrenchingly conveys a father’s grief at the loss of his child. By giving the Minotaur a preferred diet of heroes, he also explores what exactly made a hero of Greek myth, and whether heroism and virtue have anything in common. The result is a devastating examination of fatherhood and masculinity. –Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

Discover: In this devastating examination of fatherhood and masculinity, Daedalus spends his time in the underworld reckoning with his son’s death and confronting his own failures.