Chione - E. L Hunter

One is the daughter of Boreas, the north wind, snow born straight from the cold sky. Another is a mortal girl so beautiful that Apollo and Hermes came to her in one night, then boasted she outshone Artemis and took an arrow through the tongue for it. Others surface only in passing, like a snow-nymph in the mountains of Arcadia. The Greeks gave them all one name, simply their word for snow, and no one is sure whether she is one goddess with many faces or several women who happened to share a season.

That is what makes her so hard to hold. Chione left no temple and no carved face, only a scatter of mentions in poets busy with other stories. She is less a goddess anyone worshipped than the shape the Greeks gave snow, and snow does not stay. Every winter she falls again, the same and never the same, and every spring she is gone.

This book hunts all of them at once, and asks what the Greeks were reaching for when they made a goddess of the coldest, most fleeting thing they knew.