Jordanna Max Brodsky’s debut fantasy novel, The Immortals, takes place in a world in which the gods walk among us. A long time ago, isolated New Yorker Selene DiSilva had another name—Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Now, she’s just trying to get through the day with her dog by her side. But when she finds a young woman’s brutalized body washed up beside the Hudson, she returns to a world she left behind, breaking the silence with her immortal family members and working alongside a code-cracking classics professor to find out who’s behind a string of gruesome crimes. Brodsky’s debut mashes up a contemporary murder mystery with ancient myth and world history—and here she is to discuss one of her book’s more controversial historical details.
As a novelist who spends her spare time teaching American history to teenagers, I’m used to a certain degree of ignorance regarding our collective past. Their knowledge rarely extends past George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln, and their understanding of even those figures is woefully simplified. Thus, when I tossed a mention of Alexander Hamilton into my upcoming novel, The Immortals, I never dreamed anyone would question me. How wrong I was
The Immortals is a contemporary fantasy that tracks Artemis, the ancient Greek virgin goddess of the hunt and the wilderness, as she makes her way through modern Manhattan hunting down men who abuse or kill women. She has lived in New York City since the seventeenth century, and the book is peppered with brief flashbacks to her past.
One of those is an unfortunate run-in with Alexander Hamilton, whom I blithely accuse of harassing young women in a drunken stupor on July 4, 1804. After he gets Artemis jailed for trying to resist him, she takes her revenge by showing up in Hoboken on July 12 and taking her own (far more accurate) shot at the former Treasury Secretary while Aaron Burr fires into the ground. At the time I wrote it, the anecdote served as a reminder not only of Artemis’s long history with the city but also her merciless (and often unreasonable) sense of justice. She is, on many levels, an antiheroine who lives outside our modern human conceptions of morality. We’re not always supposed to like her. Nonetheless, I was shocked to find that this one small reference upset so many readers. Since when does anyone care about a duel from 200 years ago?
Enter Lin-Manuel Miranda and his widely acclaimed musical theater blockbuster Hamilton. Suddenly, Alexander Hamilton is a sympathetic, rabble-rousing, hip-hop hero. And now my kickass, relentless heroine looks like a mean-spirited assassin. Great.
This is one of the pitfalls of writing about real people—one I hoped to avoid by writing a contemporary fantasy rather than historical fiction, yet managed to stumble into nonetheless. Real people, of course, are rarely heroes or villains—they all have a mix of both in them. But a particular take on a historical figure can capture people’s imaginations in a way that crowds out other interpretations.
But rather than despair, I’ve decided to embrace the controversy. After all, I’m thrilled more Americans are expressing an interest in one of our most important founders. And it is the ability to be engaged with people from the past that my book relies on.
Artemis, too, is a “historical” figure, even if she never walked the earth. Some readers may not have heard of her before, and it’s my privilege and pleasure to introduce them to one of the world’s more fascinating deities. Others readers have a personal relationship to the goddess. For women especially, I’ve found that the fierce, solitary huntress is their favorite member of the Greek pantheon, a role model who epitomizes an escape from the constraints of patriarchy that still chafe even millennia later in our far more egalitarian society.
Portraying Artemis as a modern woman, with most of her divine powers faded away by a lack of worship, was a challenging and risky proposition. How to make her human enough to be relatable but supernatural enough to be exciting? How to be true to her origins as a celibate man-killer without turning off my male readers and allowing her to evolve into a woman who could allow a man into her heart…if not into her bed? I knew from the beginning that I would never make all my readers happy. Artemis is simply too close to their hearts. And so, it turns out, is Hamilton.
In the end, I had no choice but to let Artemis take on a life of her own. And perhaps that’s as it should be. The underlying theme of my book is that the gods, like us, must eventually find their own identities. Not ones created for them by their worshippers from so long ago, nor described by the ancient poets or carved in marble by Greek sculptors. Artemis is a goddess no longer. Now she’s just as fallible and vulnerable as any human woman. I had to let her find her own path and make her own choices. And if murdering Alexander Hamilton is one of them, who am I to stop her?
The Immortals is on sale now.