I really enjoyed Wicked Beauty. How much one loves either this book or Electric Idol might come down to your personal mileage for Katee Robert stuff that isn’t characters flirting, banging, or working through their feelings. What I mean by this is that in books 2 and 3 in this series, there’s a lot of external conflict happening that’s not relationship-building, which I enjoyed in Book 2, but which I felt slightly robbed us of the couple’s HEA establishment Book 3.

In Electric Idol’s third act, after Eros and Psyche are solidly committed but still working out ongoing personal issues and their relationship’s trust level, the plot shifts to “us against the world” mode. In which Eros and Psyche have to live out the cliché of fighting for their relationship and for each other: putting their lives and reputations on the line for their marriage, with the stakes including literal gun duels and attempted murder. I’m a sucker for characters standing up for their love in a way that feels self-sacrificial, and when the manner of doing so demonstrates their personal flaws, rather than “and then the whole room clapped” verbally-murdering the baddies. Mild spoiler: Eros fails at what he sets out to do in proving his love and loyalty. A happy outcome is achieved in another way he couldn’t have imagined, thanks to Psyche’s cleverness. Successful failure that gives the characters not what they want, but what they need? Give me that all day every day.

Wicked Beauty’s external conflict is a “Hunger Games because Reasons” plot. Which makes a silly kind of sense: all the series’ books all involve fantastical takes on contemporary media, PR, and celebrity, in a cartoonish vaguely mafiaesque AU. So, of course, rather than a literal PR war between Olympus’s inhabitants that’s all darkly serious, the plot-driving conflict takes place during The Iliad: American Ninja Warrior Edition. I tend to enjoy a silly game-show premise more when it’s not set in a realistic world, but in some sort of dystopia or fantastical alternate reality. Where it might not be reasoned or coherent, but its entire purpose is to produce great character work. But does Wicked Beauty produce great character work through its Game-show plot? Uhhh…I’m not entirely convinced it does, much as I love the rest? More on that later.

The central idea of Wicked Beauty is that the title of Ares, god of War, is vacant. And there is going to be a Triwizard Tournament (obligatory statement of non JKR endorsement) where you submit your name to the enchanted goblet Athena’s office register to compete to become Ares. For political reasons of Helen’s brother, who makes these decisions, being a dickhead, the prize for winning Ares is Helen’s hand, a plot point which has just enough congruence with the original idea of the Trojan war being about winning Helen to be perfect. I also appreciate that KR didn’t involve Briseis in this plot: I don’t think the idea of a war-captive would have sat well with a fun reimagining vaguely about the Trojan War published in 2022. Making the character someone from disempowered circumstances compared to the heroes would’ve made the central relationship much more unequal and difficult to work through, especially because KR has invoked the “woman as war prize” plot specifically to give a cathartic “fuck you” to the idea.

Though some readers expecting something closer to Song of Achilles may take umbrage at the liberties of calling this book a “retelling,” there ARE ancient stories about Helen running off with Achilles after the Trojan war, and a 20th Century epic poem written about this called Helen in Egypt. Anyone who isn’t aware of Katee’s whole approach to reimaginings of Disney stories and mythology, who isn’t on-board for her brand of imagination and eroticism and fun, might be in for a rough landing. But as the third book in a series that has well-established that tone, I think the books’ popularity will be enough to overcome that.

Canonical Iliad Helen, though she comes across more sympathetically in the text than you might think, spends all her on-page time regretting her decision to run away with Paris, weaving a literal tapestry of her regrets via a depiction of the war. I’ve read a fair amount of fiction about the Trojan War, and Helen does get a pretty rough treatment in all of them. In Atwood’s Penelopiad, Helen is a monster who makes Penelope’s life utterly miserable, even though she’s literally dead and should be past caring. In Barker’s Silence of the Girls, she’s selfish and inscrutable for the brief time she appears. In a bunch of YA titles I’ve read whose names escape me, Helen is typically selfish, awful, hated, miserable, and terrorizing of others. And sure, Wicked Beauty is not contributing to a canon of Serious Takes on Helen as an Idea – it does not aim to do that at all. But Helen with Agency, Competing For Her Own Hand, is the kind of pop culture fanfiction rewrite that I and a lot of others want to read right now.

In Wicked Beauty, Helen, none too pleased at being handed off as a prize to someone she has no say about, sneaks into Athena’s office to submit her name for the tournament and compete for her own hand. In the running are Helen’s ex-boyfriend, Paris, who was abusive to her; some other people we don’t really care about (though badass side-character Atalanta certainly made an impression on me), and of course, Achilles: ex-military dude and competition front-runner, and his best buddy Patroclus. They are a committed couple in an open relationship.

While it’s definitely not Song of Achilles adjacent in tone or concept, the broad strokes of the characters are obviously influenced by SOA’s massive popularity and cultural presence. I think Katee nicely establishes some basic congruences between those characters’ dispositions and these heroes. Achilles is self-centered and bossy with a movie-star presence, yet nevertheless is a caring person who wants to do right by those he loves. Patroclus is tender-hearted and overthinking, devotedly loyal, and made insecure by his longtime status in Achilles’s shadow. This does not make him resentful, but does make him feel undeserving of Achilles’s ongoing commitment. Their relationship has profoundly shaped them since youth and been foundational to their ideas of themselves, but at the time of the War (Games), it is on the verge of disintegrating under accumulated strain and lack of communication, despite their very deep love for each other. That’s the very basic idea of the guys from SOA that has been borrowed and reworked here: that’s what we culturally “know” about these characters.

In its early stages, the the war-games competition is great for producing silly scenarios leading to character interactions and then directly to character banging. There’s a bunch of ridiculousness about adjacent rooms with Helen inserting herself literally in the middle of the two of them. There’s a bunch of good-matured banter about everyone underestimating Helen, who, it must be noted, is a trained gymnast, so not someone totally without a chance in a Ninja Warrior type competition. Achilles and Helen are constantly antagonizing each other in a flirty way: I don’t even like this trope, but I loved it here, because the mutual respect and “I see you as an equal” attitude shines through, even if they never say it in words.

Our first moment of major conflict leading to banging is a scene begins with Helen overdoing it at the gym during training preparation. Patroclus subsequently helps her stretch, in a very accidentally sexy way, having already confessed to Achilles that he’s extremely into Helen. Achilles walks into the training facility and sees Patroclus, like, literally spreading Helen’s legs in the name of a deep hamstring stretch, looking embarrassed and turned-on. It all makes Achilles so jealous that he yells at them and hauls Helen away from Patroclus. Helen is furious. It’s been established that getting mad at Achilles is proportional to how much she wants Achilles, and it’s also been established that she super has the hots for Patroclus, having held back out of respect for his relationship with Achilles. Now she’s being reamed out though they’ve done nothing wrong. Of course their argument culminates in them spontaneously banging, then they both feel preeeetty shitty about it, as they’ve betrayed Patroclus by not working this out in a more mature way.

As far as this aligns with what we know about both characters: Helen, like, spontaneously ran off with Paris in the original story in a fit of lust, abandoning her young children, so this is a pretty chill remake of that plot as far as I’m concerned? And I feel as though impulsively, selfishly and immaturely banging someone in a fit of rage is just an on-brand thing for Achilles characters to do, if they’re wound up enough? Here, Achilles expresses so much contrition and “let’s work through this” energy, beyond the low bar typically set for self-reflection by demigods, while Helen’s libido as it is affected by her impulsivity is confessed to be an issue she’s working through. So, it’s unfair of me, but my chillness with this plot point was higher than it would’ve been for a character who was not literally named Achilles with one named Helen.

Subsequently, Achilles’s idea of apology and self-punishment is to confront the problem head on in a tit-for-tat way (excuse the horrible double entendre, friends). Very shortly after, with almost no time given for anyone to think about it, he arranges a menage in which he directs Helen and Patroclus through sexual positions and comments on how appealing every aspect of watching them is, genuinely making himself suffer by excluding himself from the action, suffering more as he is increasingly turned on. For me, this is the crucial sex scene that gets to the heart of their trio’s dynamic, and it’s absolutely scorching. I tried to read this scene in a hotel lobby, and my facial expressions had a few things to say about it.

There’s real tenderness and care that emerges in their trio. Patroclus crushes on Helen in this self-restrained and respectful way that conveys he’s the sweetest guy (not too far distant, actually, from the vibe of SOA Patroclus interacting with Briseis, though in much more consensual circumstances). Being around Patroclus brings out a tenderness and vulnerability in Helen we don’t get to see in her interactions with Achilles. Even when they’re tearing each other’s heads off, Achilles and Helen really do respect and care for each other, never crossing lines into cruelty: they are true intellectual equals and natural sparring partners in a battle of wits. In the original couple’s relationship, Patroclus’s overanalyzing is balanced by Achilles’s get-‘er-done zeal, while Patroclus reins in Achilles’ impulsivity. Except, uh, when it comes to banging Helen, and the system failure of their relationship rules propitiates a new dynamic entirely.

What I did wish for more of was a sense of what competition success or failure meant in the real world of Olympus. I didn’t dislike the War Games plot: I thought that the eventual competition outcome might happen, but was genuinely surprised and intrigued by the way it played out. And it was enjoyable to see Helen compete cleverly and surpass everyone’s low expectations of her, for her to put everyone in their place. But there was a lot of Helen navigating the games as a solo warrior, which sacrificed time from working out how Patroclus, Helen, and Achilles would operate as a team in the outside world beyond the competition, and how their relationship plays out in the world of Olympus beyond the competition?

As a point of reference, I’m going to compare this to another “the Hunger Games, because Reasons” plot, the one in Strange Love. Through that book, we are given various subplots which take us through the hero’s family problems and involve our MCs in a vengeance attempt by a wronged alien, which cumulatively demonstrate the various aspects of that world. And the book ends with what I like to call “successful failure,” where the hero and heroine are disqualified on a technicality and sent off to live in the alien hinterlands, which actually suits them way better than city life ever did. From all the problem solving they’ve done together through the novel, from the bedroom to the competition area to parties and political backrooms, it’s totally clear that theirs will really be a happy life together, in which we know how they work together and what specific types of trust and closeness their relationship is built upon. In Strange Love, as much as having a competition for breeding rights on a heavily depopulated alien planet where failure to win often means instant death makes zero sense, the other rules governing alien life are also similarly capricious and arbitrary. So I felt like “The Hunger Games Because Reasons” was pretty much the way the entire world worked via that example.

And perhaps I’m not quite being fair in wanting to see real-world impacts: one could argue that the War Games is also a distillation or microcosm of Olympus’s wild rules. In the Dark Olympus Series, we have already been given two books of social media politicking, arranged marriages, people arriving at balls having just murdered someone, semi-public sex in a sex club to prove some sort of point to high society, multiple armed shootouts, all of it wrapped in an aura of instagram influencer gossip and glamour. Characters are always crafting reputations, chasing love, breaking the rules, and risking life and limb due to nebulous and random threats: this isn’t THAT far removed. And here, the obstacles are a bit more tangible, the competition labeled as such.

But beyond whether the War Games plot works in the context of the rest, I wanted Helen and Achilles and Patroclus to have to work together on some more consequential problem outside of the sphere of the Ninja Warrior Trojan War Games. At the book’s conclusion, it’s a bit as though Helen won an Olympic medal and has consequently been nominated the minister of military defense, or something? As in, I believe Helen is actually capable of being a brilliant politician, and with Achilles and Patroclus’s help, they could cause a real shift in power, a disruption to the political order, with impact well beyond what happens in the war games, but we don’t have a demonstration of what that’d be like.

We know that Helen can be politically clever as well as seductive, Achilles would likely brazen his way through any scenario with his charisma and physicality, Patroclus would pull back everyone to strategize and act carefully before acting hot-headedly, as the other two tend to do. And we get a very short summary of that possibility at the end. But all their interaction to that point has been banging each other while trying to defeat each other inside the constraints of the game, until very near the conclusion. I’m into that dynamic, but I slightly felt the lack of an “us against the world” phase to their relationship, compared to my enjoyment of that aspect of Electric Idol.

Do check it out for the way Katee writes menage intimacy, which is so worth the price. It’s not as wildly subversive as what she does in Learn my Lesson in the Wicked Villains series, but it’s emotional, hot, consensual, a fun pop-culture take on characters with a very longstanding pop-culture presence, and above all: a very good time is had by the characters in bed.

This review was originally published on Goodreads on June 1st, 2022