Inanna

Sumerians Trilogy, Book 1

By: Emily H. Wilson

Narrated by: Zehra Jane Naqvi

Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

Stories are sly things...they can be hard to catch and kill.

Inanna is an impossibility. The first full Anunnaki born on Earth in Ancient Mesopotamia. Crowned the goddess of love by the twelve immortal Anunnaki who are worshipped across Sumer, she is destined for greatness.

But Inanna is born into a time of war. The Anunnaki have split into warring factions, threatening to tear the world apart. Forced into a marriage to negotiate a peace, she soon realizes she has been placed in terrible danger.

Gilgamesh, a mortal human son of the Anunnaki, and notorious womanizer, finds himself captured and imprisoned. His captor, King Akka, seeks to distance himself and his people from the gods. Arrogant and selfish, Gilgamesh is given one final chance to prove himself.

Ninshubar, a powerful warrior woman, is cast out of her tribe after an act of kindness. Hunted by her own people, she escapes across the country, searching for acceptance and a new place in the world.

As their journeys push them closer together, and their fates intertwine, they come to realize that together, they may have the power to change to face of the world forever.

©2023 Emily H. Wilson (P)2024 Tantor

Fantastic Mythological Fiction

Loved the story, writing and character development! I do recommend looking up content/trigger warnings as there are a lot of heavy topics such as animal death, graphic violence and sexual assault. The narrator just wasn’t for me. I wish there had been at least two narrators to cover POVs. Especially for Gilgamesh’s storyline.

Great retelling of the myth, bad narrator

I appreciated this interpretation of the myth of Inanna. However, I believe the narrator could have done a more effective job of distinguishing between different voices in the story. I frequently checked the chapter headers on my phone to identify the speaker when the point of view shifted. Perhaps adding a second narrator specifically for Gilgamesh's chapters would have mitigated this confusion.

A very skewed retelling

As one who thoroughly loves Mesopotamian mythology (I've spent countless hours reading the ETCSL archives), especially works concerning Inanna/Ishtar, I was very excited when I learned about this book. These stories are certainly under-representated in modern literature. Unfortunately, the skewed versions of the myths present here tarnishes the legacy of the original works.

This book draws heavily from the myths of the Huluppu tree, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Descent of Inanna, Dumuzi’s dream, and the love poems of Inanna and Dumuzi, and a dose of “Ancient Aliens” theory.

The distorted depiction of key mythological figures in this story is jarring, to say the least. Enki, a god portrayed as generally benevolent towards humanity, is reimagined as a sociopathic brute, while Enlil—who infamously tried to annihilate humanity in the original myths—gets recast as a flawed but well-intentioned character. Gods who were traditionally depicted as just and benevolent, like Utu, Dumuzi, Nana-Suen, and Geshtinanna, are now painted as despicable. The result feels almost disrespectful to the legacy of Sumerian mythology.

A glaring oddity in the book was characters often expressing confusion over the supposed foreignness of Ninshubur's name, even though it’s a Sumerian portmanteau. Most distracting was the reduction of Inanna herself. Though depicted in this book as strong-willed and resourceful, this often vulnerable version of Inanna is frequently a victim of circumstance, and lacks the fierce cunning, explosive spite, and ferocity that truly make her stand out in the original myths.

While the narrator did an excellent job with the material, the book’s skewed reimagining of these ancient tales detracts from the respect that these myths deserve.

Meh

I didn’t understand why this story needed to be told. I kept waiting for the plot to start but it never came.