In a mystic ritual, the seventeen year old girl Leah, the daughter of the chieftain of the Uredos nation, is initiated into the world of adults. From a childhood meeting with centaur Chiron, the god of horses, Leah retained the gift of communicating with horses. The inhabitants of her village suspect her of being a witch and mistrust her. Leah’s father wants her to soon marry Gael, a cruel and inconsiderate chieftain’s son from another tribe. During an orgiastic ceremony of sexual initiation for teenage girls, she meets the centaur Eros, with whom she has first unconscious sexual experience. Aislinn, the priest of the Uredos, drugged her unconscious, in order to fulfill a contract Uredos have with the centaurs who have no females: every young woman has to give birth to a centaur once in her life. These children are then brought up by the centaurs. In exchange the live in peace with the Uredos and protect them. Leah falls in love with Eros, they both go to Chiron to ask him for permission to legitimate their relationship. While they are on their way to the god of horses, the jealous Gael looks for them and during his search kills a few centaurs. But Leah is a brave girl and skillful at archery. She defeats Gael with her arrows. Consequently, Aislinn heals Eros, who got bruised by an arrow of Gael. At that point, Aislinn confesses the truth about the pact with the centaurs. Leah enchants Eros so that he is no longer half horse. At the end, Leah and Eros live happily together and plan to have children.

In this novel, the myth of the existence of hybrids, like centaurs is an element of the fantastic reality. In contrast to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 12), the centaurs don’t rape and kidnap brides from the wedding of the king of the Lapiths, but as there are no female Centaurs, they need human girls to perpetuate their species, hence the agreement with the Uredos to drug adolescent girls during the initiation ceremony, impregnate them when they are unconscious, and once they give birth to baby centaurs, take the children to be brought up by centaurs and as centaurs. In a book for young adults rape is obviously not a preferred topic. The mythological origin of the Centaurs is not mentioned in the book. The readers understand the text without mythological explanations, and in any case, both Eros, as the name of the god of love and the centaurs as half-man, half horse are strongly embedded in the popular culture, similarly to Chiron, known from for instance, Disney movies and movies about Hercules. Chiron is not presented in the novel as a wise scholar, who educates young heroes like Achilles (Ovid, Ars amatoria 1), but he is the god of all horses and the leader of the centaurs. This change in comparison to the ancient sources is necessary to explain where Leah’s magical gift to be able to talk to horses, comes from. Also Chiron himself talks to horses. Eros as the god of love plays an important role in this reception of the myth too. In the ancient sources (e.g., Ovid, Ars amatoria 1; 2 and Met. 1; 5) he is the little son of Venus and has the body of a young angel with a bow and arrows to make people fall in love. Here a Centaur is named Eros, because Leah falls in love with him and it is this Eros, to whom she owes her first romantic experience. The myth of the centaurs serves as a background to an unusual love story, full of conflicts and magic, between a woman and a hybrid creature. Except for the exterior appearance of the centaurs, the readers do not learn the mythical story about the centaurs. So the ancient myth remains just at the surface and offers the frame for a fantastic love story combined with a triangular relationship like in the Twilight-series (Meyer, 2008–2012), an archetypal theme of a love with obstacles – the lovers have to overcome their differences and lack of acceptance from both sides and an unhappy suitor who wants to prevent their union. The girls are described as passive victims. Only women who want to have power like the priest Aislinn are demonised as witches. Leah is in between a victim and a self-confident woman. But after marriage to Eros, she will become a wife and mother. From that point of view, the text carries traditional values.

Janka, Markus and Michael Stierstorfer, eds., Verjüngte Antike. Griechisch-römische Mythologie und Historie in zeitgenössischen Kinder- und Jugendmedien, Heidelberg: Winter, 2017.

Stierstorfer, Michael, Antike Mythologie in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Gegenwart. Unsterbliche Götter- und Heldengeschichten? [Ancient Mythology in Comtemporary Children’s Literature. Immortal Stories of Gods and Heroes?] Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017, 282 pp.