“Love is madness!” or so proclaims the eponymous character Cupid. Cupid finds himself wanting to apologize to the humans for his ample use of arrows that cause feelings of “helplessness, with a loss of will and control, with a loss of self.”

Julius Lester’s Cupid is a story of love, of love lost, and of love regained. But it’s more than a story about love, it’s also part myth retelling and adaptation, part philosophical novel, part paean to storytelling, and part an examination of human nature and relationships (part by examining gods with human foibles).

Cupid’s story needs a Psyche–meaning soul or butterfly. Psyche is a mortal, but people often think her to be a goddess because she is even more beautiful than Venus. Venus, the goddess of love, does not take kindly to having her position as the most beautiful being in all of creation usurped by a mere mortal. Cupid, as Venus’ son, is asking for trouble when he is struck with his own medicine of inexorable love from the moment he spots Psyche. Cupid “was the god of love, but he had never been in love. Love had been a game to him, a game he controlled with his bows and arrows”.

Psyche’s beauty, Cupid’s puerile tendencies (he’s a bit of a mama’s boy), and Venus’ jealousy create the impetus for the myth; Lester fills in the details. He amplifies the basic plot with the inclusion of lesser Greek and Roman deities such as Oizys the goddess of pain and Favonius the West Wind; he fleshes out the story in many places where the original myth is silent. But mostly he retains the flavor of oral storytelling with his omniscient narrator.

Lester’s cheeky omniscient narrator reveals nuggets of relationship and philosophical sagacity throughout the story, but he never fully reveals himself (Lester writes: “The narrator’s voice is mine, and then again, it isn’t.”). Readers come to understand that the narrator and the story are not always in agreement as when the narrator notes “stories can be impatient” or “the story and I have been having an argument.”

Within the story, the narrator speaks on many topics, for example:

Marital advice: “…one of the biggest problems in a marriage is what you expect of the other and what the other expects of you. The closer each person’s expectations come to meeting and shaking hands with each other, the better the marriage is going to be.”Storytelling: “Sometimes when a story says a rose is a rose, it is a rose. But then, there are times when the story says a rose, and the rose is not only a rose, it is also something else.”

Love: “Love happened. Love came to show you that you could be more than you could ever imagine, because love forced you out of the narrows of yourself and thrust you into a vastness that stretched from one end of time to the other. Nothing mattered except being in the presence of love, the greatest beauty of all.”

Lester’s retelling is lighthearted and ends happily and provides a painless introduction to the traditional myth for reluctant readers (it’s a short book and a quick read). Other Cupid and Psyche retellings you may L-O-V-E: ( )

Richie's Picks: CUPID by Julius Lester, Harcourt, January 2007, ISBN: 0-15-202056-X

"Every day around the time people's shadows snuck beneath their feet to get out of the sun, the tall wooden doors to the palace grounds swung open, and Psyche came out to take her daily walk. Men, women, children, and all the creatures stopped what they were doing to look at her. Birds flying by would see Psyche, stop flapping their wings, and fall to the ground. Ants would be toting crumbs which, to them, were as big as China. They could not see anything of Psyche except a sixteenth of an inch of her big toenail, but that was enough for them to be so overcome by her beauty that they dropped their crumbs and just stared."

"Had it been another day
I might have looked the other way
And I'd have never been aware
But as it is I'll dream of her tonight"
-- Lennon and McCartney, I've Just Seen a Face

Julius Lester's irreverent, storyteller's version of the tale of Cupid and Psyche for adolescents is a telling that is in equal parts thoroughly entertaining and exceptionally meaningful to readers young and old. As he states in his author note:

"The experience of love is the most central and profound of our lives. Yet we are given no instruction in the ways of love. Popular music and movies are our primary sources for what we think love is and should be, and as entertaining as these media are, the views of love they present are more often expressions of sentimentality instead of representations of the very hard realities of what it means to be human and what the act of loving presents us with."

"Love is careless in its choosing - sweeping over cross a baby
Love descends on those defenseless
Idiot love will spark the fusion
Inspirations have I none - just to touch the flaming dove
All I have is my love of love - and love is not loving"
-- David Bowie, Soul Love

In a version for today's readers, Psyche and Cupid are characters with whom we can relate. The first thing we hear out of Psyche's mouth is her telling her father that she doesn't appreciate his deciding what she can do and when she can do it. Meanwhile, Cupid, a hunk with wings, is totally under the thumb of his mom Venus. But that, of course, begins to change after jealous Mom sends Cupid to deal with the problem of Psyche's attracting all of that attention and, Cupid gets an eyeful of what has been making the birds fall out of the sky:

"Cupid still could not move, which is not an uncommon response in the presence of beauty. Even gods and goddesses are not exempt from beauty's forbidding and terrifying power. Let there be no mistake: Cupid was afraid. Perhaps more than any of the deities on Olympus, he was the one always in control of himself. Let the other deities entrap themselves in human emotions, but he knew better. And so it was until he saw Psyche.

"Now standing there, looking at her, for the first time in his eternal life Cupid faced a choice: maintain control and leave Psyche, or submit to his desire for her and never be wholly in control of his life ever again. (And for him, ever was not a figure of speech.)

"There come moments in each of our journeys when we can no longer continue our lives as they are. But neither can we see what we will become. We either go forward, with no idea of where we are going or what we are doing, or we remain as we are -- and begin to die, though we do not realize that is the choice we have made. This is why love is such a fearful undertaking, and why, for so many women especially, the wedding day is fraught with terror and tears. Why do people voluntarily agree to relinquish a degree of control over their lives and pledge themselves to take into consideration the needs, desires, and shortcomings of another for the rest of their lives?"

Julius Lester has spent much of his writing career taking on the responsibility for passing along stories that have been previously conveyed down through the generations. A couple of years ago, in his autobiographic, ON WRITING FOR CHILDREN & OTHER PEOPLE, he explained:

"Traditional folktales taught the adults and children of a group how to live, what kinds of behavior to emulate, and what kinds to avoid so they could be reasonably assured of having a life approved by the deities. Folktales recorded the psychic history of a group by evoking the past, affirming the present, and showing the way to the future.

"Such tales did not have individual authors. Though they may have been created by especially gifted people within the group, tales were only passed from one generation to the next because they fulfilled a need of the group. Today the oral tradition has been replaced by mass media and children's books have become the conservators of the oral tradition.

"This is, of course, a paradox. Stories from the oral tradition cease to be oral once they are written down. When confined to the page they become literature, the product of a single mind, one person's skill with words and silence. Traditional stories, however, come from a community and are shaped and reshaped by all who tell them and hear them. Literature exists on the page where it cannot be changed. Stories are elastic and are created anew on the tongue of each teller.

"The nature of our society is inimical to storytelling because we no longer live in cohesive communities. We no longer educate each other with stories in which our joys and sorrows are refashioned into an art that serves as a mirror for the entire community. The question becomes then: How can one fit the marvelous elasticity of a story onto the page without injuring the story? It is possible only if one refuses to regard the page as the story's final destination, an exalted end. The page is merely the means to return stories to the mouths and tongues of anyone who wishes to tell them."

As he has previously done with other retellings, the author succeeds in differentiating between the story and the storyteller by creating a lively and memorable personality for his storytelling narrator. Through frequent asides, imagery, and allusions, the voice of the storyteller makes us aware as readers that there is someone from our own time telling us this traditional story, someone who is interjecting a lot of humor, relevance, and wisdom into that telling. Through his employing this voice, Julius Lester makes this a tale for today.

Teens with attitudes about the irrelevance of Greek and Roman gods to their high-tech Twenty-first Century lives will find themselves doing a serious one-eighty in their thinking if and when they are fortunate enough to be turned on to this outstanding story and guide to the meaning of the verb 'to love.'

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com ( )

I had a student recommend this book to me and I thought I would like it....but I didn't. The narrator irritated me...just get on with the story! I think the whole problem is that I thought the narrator was full of himself and I just didn't like him! I enjoyed the plot, but it wasn't enough to overcome my aversion to the narrator. ( )

A less than original telling of Psyche and Cupid, this had an interesting narrator's voice that, at times, was annoying and at others worth listening to. It really wasn't much more than the basic tale of Cupid and Psyche's love coupled with Venus' wrath how they thwarted her. ( )

This young adult novel tells the love story of Cupid and Psyche from a modern perspective--the story remains the same, but the narrator has a decidedly modern voice. It's cute and, all in all, just okay. ( )