Review: Circe

Madeline Miller, Circe (Little, Brown and Company 2018)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35959740-circe?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=RnlnvQxeHx&rank=1

6 stars!
Divine daughter of Helios, Circe defies the Olympians by using magical herbs to interfere with the lovers Scylla and Glaucos and is banished to the solitary island of Aiaia. There she is visited by numerous personages we know from mythology—Hermes, Daedalus—many whom she makes her lover—as well as several shiploads of would-be rapists, whom she transforms into pigs. She practices her witchcraft on Jason and Medea, her sister Pasiphaë, Odysseus and his men.
Circe has powers we mortal women may envy, yet she knows her limitations. In exile, she repents and is forced to come to terms with her existence. She makes her peace with Penelope and Telemachus, even leading to new alliances.
From her spectacular debut The Song of Achilles, Miller pushes further back in time, to a magical age when gods walked among men.
And she has further honed her craft. Circe is chock full of delicious phrases. A first kiss, ‘I reached across that breathing air between us and found him.’ The god Helios, her father was ‘a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.’ Odysseus, who ‘had walked with those who could crack the world like eggs’, describes Achilles, ‘prophecies hung on him like ocean-weed’, and period-appropriate metaphors, such as ‘There were answers in me. I felt them, buried deep like last year’s bulbs, growing fat’ and ‘The sky darkened like iron’.
Following in the footsteps of Mary Renault, Miller gorgeously retells the old myths in a way modern readers can relate to. She captures evocatively what it would be like to be a goddess among mortals.