A debut mash-up of The Hunger Games, Keeping Up with the Kardashians and the ancient story of the Minotaur

LIFESTYLES OF GODS AND MONSTERS
by Emily Roberson
FSG Books for Young Readers, September 2019

How do you keep a secret when every minute of your life is packaged up and sold to the world? In a Crete that could exist today, seventeen-year-old Ariadne has been famous for as long as she can remember. From sex tapes to shopping sprees, everything in her royal family’s entertainment empire is curated, recorded and shared. The crown jewel is The Contest, a bloody reality television spectacular where fourteen Athenian teenagers must fight against the Minotaur, a half-human/half-bull monster who is Ariadne’s little brother, condemned by vengeful gods to the darkness of the Labyrinth beneath the family estate. For eleven years, Ariadne has led the competitors down to the Labyrinth, to their imminent deaths. She hates it, but believes she must participate if the gods are ever going to cure her brother from his fate. But when Theseus, the new Athenian prince, volunteers to fight the Minotaur and asks Ariadne to help him, everything changes. For her family, Ariadne and Theseus provide an exciting and sexy new storyline with buzz and ratings. But as Ariadne really falls for Theseus, she is thrown into her own kind of maze, where she must uncover what is true, what is false, and who she can trust, all while under the watchful eyes of the cameras. In a world supposedly predestined by the gods, Ariadne must find a way to make her own destiny.

Emily Roberson has been a bookseller in Little Rock, a newspaper reporter in Vicksburg, a marketing manager in Boston, and a writer in Chapel Hill and Dallas. She graduated from Brown University and has a master’s degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin. She now lives in Little Rock with her husband and three sons.