Title Circe Series --- Author Madeline Miller Cover Art Will Staehle Publisher Little, Brown and Company - 2018 First Printing Little, Brown and Company - 2018 Category Mythology Warnings None Main Characters Circe, Helios, Daedalus, Odysseus, Telemachus, Penelope, Telegonus, the Minotaur and many more familiar characters Main Elements Gods

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child - not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power - the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.

Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.

I loved reading The Song of Achilles so I was excited to read Circe, though I wondered how much there was to say about her, would Miller have to make up a lot of stuff as filler? I only knew Circe as the witch encountered by Odysseus during his journeys.

But there is much much more to her tale. She is the daughter of Helios, the god of the sun and one of the few remaining Titans, and a Naiad, a minor goddess of the sea. But Circe is different, she isn't a Titan, nor a god like the Olympians, her power is different as she and her three siblings discover, she is a witch, able to draw power from plants and other things, and this frightens everyone, so Zeus demands she be exilted to an island where it is believed she can do little harm (her other siblings are left alone though they have similar powers).

Circe's tale also ties into that of Minos and his wife Pasiphae who is Circe's sister. Pasiphae is of course the mother of the Minotaur, and monstrous beast born of a love afair between the witch and a sacred bull. Yyes, that is kinky and weird and very gross and I've found that tale to be one of the most distrubing of them all, somehow the mechanics of Zeus raping someone in the form of an ant isn't so weird since, well he's a god, and how it worked wasn't explained. But Pasiphae asked Daedalus to build her a cow costume so she could woo the bull and...ick.

And of course this brings in Daedalus, and Ariadne, who herself is tied to Theseus. One thing I've discovered reading the Greek myths is that they are all interconnected and they overlap (and the family trees are seriously inbred, so everyone is related to everyone else).

Of course we see Circe's encounter with Odysseus, and then later, we find out what happened to Odysseus after he returned home and killed the suitors, something I didn't come across elsewhere. It wasn't a happily ever kind of reunion...

Anyway, I don't want to give away the full story, though most of it is of course already known. But what makes Miller's retellings special is she has this wonderful writing style, it just draws me in, I can't point out what it is that I love about it, but it does stand out against other books. I also enjoy the fact that she takes relatively minor characters such as Patroclus and Circe and tells these interconnected myths though a fresh set of eyes, giving voice to those that maybe have at most handful of lines of dialog in the recorded texts. It is the same story, you know how it will end, and in Greek myths it rarely ends well, but at the same time as you read you still feel like you don't know what will come next. Miller also has a way of envisioning the gods that make the more than just humans with superpowers, but to remind us that they are not remotely human, they don't think or act like us, and that being immortal has a great effect on your sense of time.

I must say both of Miller's books lived up to the hype around them and I hope she will continue to write more.