Review: “Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes”and “George Washington is Cash Money” by Cory O’Brien

I’ll be the first to admit it: Tumblr can be pretty useless sometimes. In fact, the majority of posts that I see when I scroll through my dashboard are Vines or the most decadent pictures of pizza, but when Tumblr users set their minds to it, they can make an impact on things. Earlier this year, I read a post consisting of several pictures of a Table of Contents featuring chapter titles like “The Norse are METAL” and “Abraham Is Totally Cool About Stabbing His Kid In The Face.”

Reading through the comments, it seemed that thousands of users agreed that these titles were the ultimate summaries of well-known stories of mythological deities and figures. Later, I saw the post again, this time with a new comment, a hyperlink: “How a single Tumblr post turned this unknown book into a bestseller” by The Daily Dot. And that, my friends, is the not-so-short story of how I happened to stumble upon “Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes” and “George Washington is Cash Money” by Cory O’Brien.

I consider myself to be relatively well-versed in Greek mythology, having read my fair share of tales and gone through my “Percy Jackson” phase in middle school. But never before in my life have I read such a glorious narrative of Greek (and Sumerian, Japanese, African, Judeo-Christian, etc.) stories.

Reading these books didn’t even feel like reading: the novels are written in such a colloquial, open, and, dare I say, bawdy manner that reading normally-tedious tales of other cultures was a joy. It took me less than five minutes to read through each chapter, making it easy to put down the book when I needed to do something else and easing the guilty burden of stopping in the middle of a chapter.

However, I will warn you that if you are bothered by profanity or can’t deal with “inappropriate” topics, stay away! If, on the other hand, it is your greatest joy in life to hear stories about how important figures in history made mistakes and then laugh at them, raising your self-esteem, by all means, forge ahead.

Short, sweet, and sassy, these novels are perfect for readers who either have an interest in mythology and history, or enjoy comical, colloquial writing.