This book is a fun fantasy written in first person. The main character is a high school English teacher from Oklahoma who frequents estate and garage sales in order to afford furnishings for her home. At one of these sales she comes upon an urn which has a picture that looks a lot like her on it. Through some very mysterious circumstances, Shannon purchases the urn. Then she has a car wreck.

The car wreck is engineered by a goddess/priestess from a parallel dimension who is a spoiled brat and has decided that being goddess of a world full of technology would be much more fun than where she is from, an early civilization period with swords and bows. When Shannon wakes up, she’s suddenly supposed to be someone else. This person looks exactly like her, but isn’t at all like her in personality.

Shannon’s been left holding the bag by the spoiled Rhiannon. Unfortunately, the bag contains lots of things Shannon doesn’t understand at all and some no one even suspects. Fortunately, it includes people whose personalities she knows from her own world and Shannon can take an amazing amount of bizarreness very well.

The story contains a fascinating mix of humans, horses that can think, centaurs, wizards, shapeshifters, vampires?, and a 21st century English teacher who would really like to have some toilet paper, thank you very much.

The story is well-written and a quick read. I started reading it again as soon as I had finished.

Obviously the world view is not Christian. In this parallel world mythic gods and goddesses are real and choose individual’s to speak to and who speak for them. Shannon/Rhiannon is one of these.

There is sex in the book, both explicit and implicit. The explicit sex is between a husband and wife. Sex that is talked about having happened, but not detailed, is not between spouses. There is also no moral response to the fact that several of the characters have multiple partners. In addition, several fantasies are introduced in dreams, but are not described in detail.

There is a lot of drinking in the book. The culture is one where wine is drunk routinely. The only incident of drunkenness is a light case and is basically a mistake; someone misjudged the alcohol content of the booze.

Finally, there are two rape scenes. These are not sexually described. The violence is described, though. One is not even explained, but you know what is happening because you’ve already seen the other one. It is very clear that the rapists are BAD guys. –If you have read many of my reviews, you know that rapes tend to freak me out and I put the book down. For some reason, these did not. And I’ve reread the book.

Goddess by Mistake by PC Cast

reviewed by me on a disappearing website