Circe by Madeline Miller

 

"The hairs stood on the back of my neck. All who were wise feared the god Apollo's wrath, silent as sunlight, deadly as plague."

Circe is born to the sun god Helios and the nymph Perse. As far as goddesses go, she is unremarkable in every way; no beauty, no powers, and the insufferable voice of a mortal. She is the shame of her family and seems destined to remain so... Until the day comes when she realizes she can use herbs to bend life to her will. Circe isn't just a goddess, she's a witch and like most witches she must be punished for it and is sentenced to exile by Zeus and her own father.

In college I had The Odyssey and The Iliad as required reading for a literature class that I had thought I'd enjoy taking at the time I enrolled in it... Spoiler alert, I finished neither the story nor the class. Thankfully Madeline Miller managed to write a Greek epic that was told in relative time lapse, meaning just because a story spans a thousand years doesn't mean it should take the reader a thousand years to read it.  

Never having heard of Circe before, I started this book under the assumption that it was destined for tragedy much like The Song of Achilles. I braced myself for heartache as I began reading. My initial impression was that it was a light-hearted page turner for a book that was destined to end in doom. I was also overjoyed to find a happyish ending!

The story opens with Circe surrounded by characters (most notably her family) that are capricious, vain and petty, and merciless. The gods and goddesses are used to being worshipped just for existing and revel in their fame, totally self-absorbed and cruel in their boredom. But Circe is not worshipped, and she grows up under the abuse of her own family, producing a softer more sympathetic and all-around likeable character.

Initially she's not unhappy with her eventual exile, feeling freer in captivity than with her family, even feeling powerful as she tames lions and wolves and grinds herbs into potions and spellwork. And she finds she is not in complete isolation, taking Hermes, Daedalus, and eventually Odysseus, as lovers. Nymphs begin arriving in droves as gods begin casting out their misbehaving daughters, sending them to live with Circe as a bizarre punishment.

Circe starts out as an innocent but does not remain that way, growing vengeful after being brutalized by sailors who washed ashore, and later fearful and defensive as the goddess Athena begins to threaten everything she loves. The one constant is her force of will that supports her magic and her way of life. Madeline Miller cleverly parallels this character evolution with Circe's talent for transformation, her ability to turn rivals into monsters.

And despite her hardships, Circe doesn't turn herself into a monster in the end. Instead, she commits herself to righting the wrongs that she committed, setting herself apart from her family once more by acknowledging that she had been guilty of wrongdoing.

There really wasn't anything I could criticize about this book. It was an engaging and beautiful, if somewhat romanticized, retelling of a classic Greek myth. I gave it five stars.