Gods and Goddesses in Love: Making the Myth a Reality for You

""Three thousand years ago, my Greek ancestors tried to identify the forces playing themselves out in human nature and created the eight gods and seven goddesses of Olympus,"" begins Stassinopoulos in this follow-up to her Conversations with the Goddesses. Here she sketches seven human personality types based on the traits of the famous ladies of Olympus--Aphrodite, Artemis, Athena, Demeter, Hera, Hestia and Persephone. To help readers discover which goddess they most embody, Stassinopoulos offers a 12-question quiz that could have come straight from the pages of Cosmo; there's a similar quiz designed to help them figure out which god their man most resembles. A Demeter woman, Stassinopoulos writes,""knows mothering as the most honorable occupation for a woman"" and would pair well with a Poseidon man, while a Hestia lady is""centered and a great listener,"" but might need to be drawn out of her shell by a Hermes man. A native of Greece (and, incidentally, the sister of political commentator Arianna Huffington), Stassinopoulos capably relates the deities' lives to that of contemporary women. But finding an absolute match among the broadly drawn goddesses is difficult and only cursorily addressed. Stassinopoulos's prose can be both hackneyed and awkward, but her examples of real life couples (e.g.""Elaine and Mike: Opening the Channels of Communication"") ground the book's flights of poetic and mythic fancy.