A review by shafnut
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

adventurous hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

3.5

Did everyone know that Ariadne was going to end like this? I feel like with TSOA I already knew what was going to happen because I read Circe first. I think that's what made my experience with Ariadne better because there wasn't all this expectation for the "big event" to happen.

I'm slowly starting to realize that the quickest way to my heart when it comes to a protagonist is to have her be a man-hater. The biggest theme in this book has to be how women consistently pay for the mistakes of men and suffer because of them. I think the biggest thing that was missing for me was that arc of character development where the characters do something to change their fate. 

I expected so much more from Phaedra - I know it's hard to move away from the existing stories when it comes to Greek Mythology, but I wanted her to show more of her independant side - "Phaedra never could accept anything that wasn’t as she wanted it to be." & "It had chafed against my nature all of my life to wait passively for things to happen."

Although I have to say that Jeniffer Saint's writing was beautiful - "Perhaps it would feel exhilarating, to sweep through the air, to plummet in its weightless embrace, free for a few glorious, doomed seconds."

Some Highlights:
"If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man’s actions, I would not hide away"

"however blameless a life we led, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do."

"It was the women, always the women, be they helpless serving girls or princesses, who paid the price."

"these men, these gods who toyed with our lives and cast us aside when we had been of use to them, who laughed at our suffering or forgot our existence altogether."

"and like a thousand women before me, I would pay the price of what we had done together."

"A fallen woman is the sweetest entertainment they know; I saw it before,"

"The price we paid for the resentment, the lust and the greed of arrogant men was our pain,"