A review by zombiemozart0725
Circe by Madeline Miller

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Madeline Miller, possessing a litany of academic qualifications that set her apart from the world of Greek mythology fanfiction, manages to combine in this book an intimate knowledge of the Greek theogony and the family trees that bind all Greek gods, a wealth of character development for one of the most interesting figures in the stories of both Odysseus and Medea, AND a brutally honest feminist gaze at the Ancient Greek world from the perspective of the women who lived within it. She communicates this understanding of her material through gorgeous prose rife with metaphor (as this is what a myth is at its core) without stepping onto the slippery slope of purple prose that endangers the comprehensibility of the entire book. Grim without being hopeless, witty without being obnoxious, and surprising even when we've known how such stories have ended for thousands of years, Miller is all at once a historian, a poet, and a feminist in this book. Its depiction of its complex cast of characters makes going back to Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series genuinely jarring. If Riordan's sprawling, quippy, seemingly endless mythological universe is comparable to the MCU, Miller has written Logan. She is in a league of her own. 
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