A review by aformeracceleratedreader
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

adventurous emotional sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

3.0

I've read a couple feminist/women focused retellings (Circe, The Witch's Heart) and Ariadne is the weakest of them. I liked it overall, but it felt like the interesting aspects were not as detailed as other aspects. I was hoping for a story about the sisters being the focus, but the romantic love was more heavily the focus. I understand that we need to see these terrible dudes/gods for what they are and how they force the hands of the women in these tales (how women are used/abused in these myths and legends), but I really wish the sisters were given more of a personality than what we got. It seemed like even though this was supposed to be female focused, the dudes in here were still given more depth, character, and story significance than our actual main women. I'm sure it's difficult to build on characters that we didn't get much from before like the male characters of these stories who we all have baseline knowledge of if we know any Greek mythology, but I feel the women were just given very generic and flat personalities. Ariadne's character and Phaedra's character had so much potential in the beginning but by the end, they were letdowns. This could've been great, but it fell short on a lot of parts for me. 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings