"Gods Behaving Badly" was a British farse that had me laughing at every turn. Here's the general gist: All of the Greek Gods are forced to live in squalor in a rundown dilapidated house in an unsavory neighborhood in London. Their powers are draining as no one belives in them anymore...they are myths after all. Enter Alice and Neil, mere mortals who tamper and change the Gods outlook. How that happens, you will just have to pick the book up to understand...don't want to give too much away. ( )

This book is extremely funny, and very raunchy. Readers beware! ( )

The Greek gods are alive and well and living in a crumbling London house. And they still get a kick out of messing with mortals, namely the awkward and timid would-be couple Alice and Neil. I laughed quite a bit at this one, but I will say that it's much funnier to people familiar with Greek myth. The humor is rather adult, but then, so were the antics of the gods in Greek myth! I think I'll get a copy for a friend of mine whose passion is ancient mythology. ( )

In Marie Phillips' Gods Behaving Badly, we find the Greek gods and goddesses living together in a filthy, run-down house in London. Artemis is a dog walker. Apollo is working as a t.v. psychic. Aphrodite is a phone sex operator. Eros is a born-again Christian. Dionysus owns a sleazy bar, "Bacchanalia". Hermes is still responsible for shepherding the souls of the dearly departed on their way into the underworld, but the entrance to Hades lies within a subway tube.

The gods, "terribly weakened over time," are suffering the effects of being unneeded and unwanted. People just don't believe anymore, or they've fallen in with various heresies. "If it wasn't for Jesus," Artemis complains, "I'd probably still be living on Olympus, running on the hillsides." My God, even Eros has fallen under the spell of that famous carpenter. Bickering with Aphrodite, the petulant boy whines, "I wish the Virgin Mary was my mother." The only thing worse than these humiliations is the endless boredom they have to endure, and that turns out to be their Achilles heel.

The gods seem to have little to do other than to harbor grudges, sabotage and double cross each other. To teach her nephew Apollo a lesson, Aphrodite has her son Eros shoot him with an enchanted arrow, making him fall in love with a very mediocre human named Alice. Of course, Alice is already in love with a geeky engineer named Neil, and so is destined to spurn Apollo's love. Chaos ensues when Apollo's sister Artemis hires Alice to clean the family's home. When Alice resists Apollo's advances, he lashes out threatening not only Alice but the entire world. Neil must channel his inner Hercules in order to "save the [cleaner:], save the world."

Gods Behaving Badly is a thoroughly amusing story that captures both the spirit and capricious nature of the Greek gods and goddesses, and stitches them into a modern-day tapestry of hilarity! Marie Phillips shares her wonderfully wicked imagination with the reader, making for an impossible-to-put-down read. As the story quickly unfolds, Phillips peppers the novel with an abundance of Greek mythology, making the story laugh-out-loud funny.

With a highly imaginative portrayal of the Greek gods dealing with their loss of power in "the age of non-believing," Marie Phillips' Gods Behaving Badly is delightful and refreshing. The modernization of the Greek gods, is as believable as it is hilarious in this witty mixture of mythology and reality. If you have any interest at all in Greek mythology, or if you're just looking for a book so funny it'll make you pee your pants, pick up Gods Behaving Badly. ( )

I really wanted to like this book. The premise sounds really interesting (a comedy about the Greek gods living in modern London) but it was a huge dissappointment. The plot is boring and the characters (especially the human ones) are dull. It has some funny lines, though, but not enough to make up for the rest. ( )