Title Ariadne Series --- Author Jennifer Saint Cover Art --- Publisher Flatiron Books - 2021 First Printing Flatiron Books - 2021 Category Mythology Warnings None Main Characters Ariadne, Theseus, Phaedra, Dionysus Main Elements Gods, monsters

Ariadne, princess of Crete, grows up greeting the dawn from her beautiful dancing floor and listening to her nursemaid's stories of gods and heroes. But beneath her golden palace echo the ever-present hoofbeats of her brother, the Minotaur, a monster who demands blood sacrifice.

When Theseus, the Prince of Athens, arrives to vanquish the beast, Ariadne sees in his green eyes not a threat but an escape. Defying the gods, betraying her family and country, and risking everything for love, Ariadne helps Theseus kill the Minotaur. But will Ariadne's decision ensure her happy ending? And what of Phaedra, the beloved younger sister she leaves behind?

Hypnotic, propulsive, and utterly transporting, Jennifer Saint's Ariadne forges a new epic, one that puts the forgotten women of Greek mythology back a the heart of the story, as they strive for a better world.

After reading a couple retellings of Greek myth that I did not enjoy I thought maybe I was just tired of theme, I'd started with The Iliad back in January after all. But Ariadne made it clear it wasn't the theme I was tired of, those other books just weren't as good. Just as I loved Miller's Circe and Song of Achilles, I immediately fell in love with Ariadne. Saint has a way of just making these characters come alive.

Everyone knows that Ariadne gave Theseus the ball of twine to find his way back out of the Labyrinth, but do you know Theseus then takes Ariadne from Crete and immediately abandons her on what appears to be a the deserted island Naxos? After giving him what he needed to be a hero he left her to die. So is the tale of so many women in Greek mythology, so often secondary to the male characters, and even more often a piece of property to be disposed of when inconvenient.

Well, she doesn't die, since Naxos is the home to a young god named Dionysus. I never put much thought to this particular god of wine and debauchery, but Saint made him a person, who starts off enamoured by mortals and who considers the other Olympians as stuffy and boring and full of themselves. But time changes everyone, even the gods and he finds that being worshipped isn't such a bad thing after all.

And then there is Phaedra, Ariadne's younger sister. Well, if you can't marry one princess, why not marry the other? And so Phaedra is wed to the very man she believes allowed her sister to die. At least Theseus is more interested in going on quests than ruling Athens so he's rarely home to bother her much, and Phaedra finds that running a city-state is very much to her tastes. But when she finds she cannot love the sons her husband gives her (post-partum depression?) she beings to feel she needs something more...and then discovers her sister is alive...and married to a god.

Finding retellings about the war of Troy or Odysseus' adventures are easy, but I was so happy to find a retelling of another famous tale, and also to find it there was so very much more to it than just a bull-headed man-beast in an underground labyrinth hungering for human flesh. That part of the story takes at most the first third of the book. There was so much to the tale I hadn't stumbled across yet, even given how many Greek myths I've read this year, or that were a single sentence or a mere footnote in another tale. Jennifer Saint breaths life into these women of Greek myth. She can't change their tragic fates but she can give them personalities and stories of their own.

And one thing I'm really coming to appreciate in the Greek myths is how intertwined they are. Miller's Circe is the sister of Pasiphae, the mother of Ariadne. Circe is also aunt to Medea who betrays her father and maries Jason of the Argonauts. Dionysus has a grudge against his half brother Perseus who has his own adventures (little things like defeathing the Gorgon). Minos, Ariadne's father, becomes a judge of souls of the dead (wish I knew why, he didn't seem to have good judgement in life) and encounters Dante in his Divine Comedy. Theseus gets stuck in the underworld while trying to kidnap Persephone and Hercules ends up rescuing him. Theseus also kidnaps and rapes Hippolyta (who is later accidentally killed by her sister Penthesilea who in grief choses to fight in the Trojan War in the hopes of dying in battle). And guess who else he kidnaps, yep, a young Helen. It's like one crazy epic soap opera where everyone is everyone else's enemy, lover or long lost relative (often incestuous). The more I read, the more I want to read more, to see how all these threads all come together into this intricate whole.

But if you will only read a handful of Greek Myth retellings, make sure Ariadne is on the list.