J.A. Rock is with us here today for their blog tour of Minotaur.

Thanks for coming to Love Bytes, J.A. Rock!

Blurb:

Know this: I am not a warrior. I am a disease.

When I was six, my parents died.

When I was sixteen, I was locked away in Rock Point Girls’ Home. Nobody wants to deal with a liar. An addict. A thief.

Nobody except Alle. She is pure, and she’s my friend in spite of all the rotten things I am.

There was once another girl like me—long ago. A cast-off daughter. A lying little beast who left a red stain across the land with her terrible magic. She’s imprisoned now in a maze high up on the cliffs. They say she’s half woman, half bull. They say she dines on human tributes and guards a vast treasure. They say she was born wicked.

But I know her better than the history books or stories do. She and I dream together. Our destinies are twisted up like vines.

Except I’m not going to turn out wicked like she is. I can save myself by destroying her. I’m going to break out of this place, and I’m going to enter the labyrinth and take her heart.

And once I’m redeemed, maybe Alle will love me.

Find our more of Minotaur on Riptide.

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Minotaur and Beauty

It’s somewhat difficult for me to write a book with a female-centric cast without at least touching on the theme of beauty. Especially when the story borrows from Greek mythology, where women’s looks launch wars, perpetuate rivalries, and serve as prizes. But what’s awesome about Greek mythology is that women, both gods and mortals, are just as fucked up, strong, and terrifying as men. And yet there’s still a current of traditionalism in mythology: men compete with action while women compete with looks.

I wanted a book about women where women’s power doesn’t come from magic or the desirability. That acknowledges societal elements like homophobia and gendered expectations without preaching. Because even in a story that’s not driven by the male gaze, that’s set in an alternate universe, ideas about beauty would still exist, and I wanted to touch on those.

In Minotaur, Thera is unapologetically unpretty. “Pretty girls never did much for me,” she says. “Goddamn, but I’d rather look like a killer than a princess.” When she meets Alle, she initially disdains Alle’s looks: “In tales, women are often soft, pensive, and trapped. They sit by windows, and where a starved dog in a pen is a sad thing, a maiden silent at a window is supposed to be a thing of beauty. I never bought that shit, and I was unimpressed by Alle’s lovely wistfulness. It seemed perverse, if you truly had a secret sadness, to advertise it as boldly as she did.”

And yet Thera does come to acknowledge beauty and its significance: in Alle, in the labyrinth, in the world around her. To the point where the Minotaur is able to play on one of Thera’s deepest, unacknowledged fears: that Thera views Alle, not as a fully realized human being, but as a prize. The beautiful thing that Thera will win when she’s completed her heroic task.

For Thera, who doesn’t like to see women reduced to physical appearance, the idea that she might secretly value beauty at the expense of substance is both repugnant and oddly powerful. Suddenly she has the opportunity to do what men do and reduce a woman to win-ability, fuckability. And she has to actively choose to push beneath the surface of Alle’s physical beauty and love a woman just as flawed and scarred as she is.

Fiction often beautifies protagonists in a way that seems to Thera like a betrayal. She relishes ugliness even as she fears that her own goes far beneath the skin, and rejects beauty even though part of her longs for it. I didn’t want to write a story about women that focused on beauty, and I wanted Thera’s desires and ambitions to go far beyond the sexual and the romantic. But I also wanted to explore the confusing messages women receive about beauty, power, and self-worth.

J.A. Rock is the author of queer romance and suspense novels, including By His Rules, Take the Long Way Home, and, with Lisa Henry, The Good Boy and When All the World Sleeps. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama and a BA in theater from Case Western Reserve University. J.A. also writes queer fiction and essays under the name Jill Smith. Raised in Ohio and West Virginia, she now lives in Chicago with her dog, Professor Anne Studebaker.

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Thanks for being part of the tour! To celebrate this release, I’m giving one commenter Lost in a Jigsaw, the award winning maze puzzle—all the pieces fit together, so the only way to know if you’ve put it together correctly is to solve the maze. If this sounds too much like torture, rest assured that you also get a $15 Riptide voucher. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post with a way to contact you. On October 26th, I’ll draw a winner from all eligible comments. Contest is not limited to US entries. If you’d like, follow the whole tour—the more comments you leave, the more chances you have to win!