Wearing the Lion Audiobook By John Wiswell cover art

Wearing the Lion

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Wearing the Lion

By: John Wiswell
Narrated by: Christian Black, Elizabeth Klett
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About this listen

Nebula Award-winning author of Someone You Can Build a Nest In John Wiswell brings a humanizing and humorous touch to the Hercules story, forever changing the way we understand the man behind the myth—and the goddess reluctantly bound to him

Sometimes a goddess's worst enemy is her biggest fan.

Heracles, hero of Greece, dedicates all his feats to the goddess Hera. If only he knew that his very face is an insult to her . . . as he is yet another child that Hera's dipshit husband, Zeus, had out of wedlock.

"Auntie Hera" loathes every minute of Heracles's devotion, until she snaps and causes an unspeakably tragic accident: the death of Heracles's children. Plunged into grief and desperate for revenge, Heracles is determined to find the god that did this.

Wracked with guilt and desperate to save face, Hera distracts Heracles with monster-slaying quests, only to find that he is too traumatized to enact more violence. Instead, Heracles cares for the Nemean lion, bonds with the Lernaean hydra, and heeds the Ceryneian hind.

Each challenge adds a new monster to Heracles's newfound family. A family that just might lay siege to Mount Olympos.

©2025 John Wiswell (P)2025 Tantor Media
Dragons & Mythical Creatures Fairy Tales Fantasy Historical Mythology Ancient Greece Greek Mythology Tearjerking Witty
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Wearing the Lion is an enjoyable read, but not an engrossing one. In Wiswell's Greek myth reimagining, he uses very modern language including slang and modern vulgarities (i.e. dipshit) that make it difficult to really get any sense of mythological greatness. When you pull the gods and demigods down to human level, they turn out to be a bunch of losers and it is hard to see how anyone ever would choose these "people" to worship. Ultimately, it wasn't just that there were no truly admirable characters (Heracles has a good heart, but he's so stupid and Hera is just schizophrenic - swinging wildly between villainy and nobility), it's that I didn't identify with the characters and never really cared what happened to them. Narration by Christian Black (Heracles chapters) and Elizabeth Klett (Hera chapters) was quite good.

Mildly entertaining, not engrossing

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