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Waking up on the beach in Greece after a midnight party, Cleo, a British-Greek tourist, sees a stranger sitting next to her. The stranger has a giant spider on his forearm.
So begins an incredible odyssey through the nine levels of the mysterious mountain populated by an odd assortment of monsters, demons, and avatars of dead gods. Still grieving the unsolved disappearance of her twin sister Cora, Cleo is thrust into the world whose rules she does not understand and whose inhabitants confound everything she thought she knew about Greek mythology. Confronted by Woven Women, masked huntresses, sentient graffiti, and Mother of Monsters, Cleo has to make sense of it all. And meanwhile, a mysterious Call reverberates in her brain: You have to go up. You have to find your sister.
A story of self-discovery, courage, and breathtaking adventure, Nine Levels is a highly imaginative, innovative, and engrossing retelling of familiar legends with a twist you won’t see coming.
“Come on!” The woman set off at a
brisk pace and Cleo, too shocked to assert her independence, followed. She cast
a fearful glance toward the bench where she had woken up, but the man with a
spider was gone. Had he really been there?
Cleo trudged on, keeping her head
down and refusing to look to her right where the impossible monolith of the
mountain rose above the promenade. If she did not acknowledge it, would it go
away? It was a weird thought but no weirder than everything else that was
happening to her. The dazzle of the sun seemed to be dissolving reality into a
fluid nightmare. All she wanted right now was to take a hot shower, discard her
salt-encrusted clothes, and hide her head under the blanket, hoping to fall
asleep – or to wake up.
“Are you alone here?” the crow
woman asked.
“With friends.”
“Where are they?”
That was a good question, which
unleashed Cleo’s pent-up indignation at Iris and Mick for abandoning her on the
beach. She opened her mouth to say she did not know, and they could go to hell
for all she cared – mates don’t do things like this, leaving you alone and
unconscious on the beach after a party, to be robbed or worse…
The words stuck in her mouth. She
suddenly realized something she should have realized immediately when the crow
woman had first addressed her.
Cleo understood the woman
perfectly, but she could not tell what language she was speaking.
Cleo spoke fluent Greek. Her
mother Daphne was a Greek who married an Englishman named Jerrod Brown and
moved to Brighton with him. When Mr. Brown abandoned his wife and twin
daughters to disappear into the limbo of deadbeat husbands and fathers, the girls
were shipped to their maternal grandmother Eleni on Karystos. When they
reluctantly came back to England several years later, Cleo and Cora spoke only
Greek to each other. Other identical twins develop their own private languages;
the Brown twins picked up the language of Homer for that purpose. Daphne, who
always tried to be more British than the Queen, was not happy, but she had
enough trouble surviving on the council estate to worry about the twins’
national identity.
Growing up bilingual had its
advantages and disadvantages. Cora seemed to have accumulated more mental
bruises from being suspended between two worlds; Cleo fit in better by learning
to shapeshift linguistically, picking up accents like trophies, to the point
that her friends in London did not know she spoke Greek and her Greek
acquaintances did not realize she was British.
But even if Cleo had
automatically answered the crow woman in Greek, how could she not know what
language they were speaking? It made no sense.
“I am Cleo,” she said
tentatively. “What’s your name?”
She heard the sounds leaving her
mouth, but for the life of her, she could not say whether it was English or
Greek. It was…language, that was all; a means of communication. She understood
herself. She knew the crow woman understood her. But it was as if the richness
of many different tongues had been compressed into something uniform and bland.
Cleo, like all bilingual people, felt she had different personas in Greek and
in English, and now these personas were blended into an average Cleo. As her
language became invisible to her, she felt she was becoming invisible to
herself.
“I’m Alexandra,” the crow woman responded, and Cleo tried to roll the sound of the name on her tongue, tasting each syllable. Was it the broad A of English or the more subdued Ἀ of Greek? She could not tell.
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