Fully Booked — Episode 14
Reading is something that used to be great, until life got in the way. But it doesn’t have to be like that — you can have a life and love reading, and we’re here to help. Welcome back to Fully Booked, the series for people who don’t know what to read or where to start.
Historical fiction and classics buffs, this one’s for you! Adult retellings of classical mythologies? What’s not to like? Double points for shining a spotlight onto a lesser known figure, or if you disagree that she’s lesser known then you’ll at least concede that Circe has always been painted as a villain by history. This work gives us a feminist retelling of Circe’s life, complete with heartbreak, grief, and stupendous resilience.
Circe — Madeline Miller
STATS
Borrowed from — my library’s E-resources
Pages — 393
Trigger warnings — on page description of rape; emotional, verbal, and physical abuse; imprisonment; mentions of incest; cheating; arranged/forced marriage; so much misogyny; self harm; suicidal ideation;
Rating — 4 stars
This is something that’s been on my reading radar for a bit, but I’d never really got around to for no particular reason. Having now finished it, I think the reason was that I knew that Greek and Roman mythologies always last for longer than I think they will, and this book was no exception. However, don’t mistake this for dislike, I enjoyed this read a whole lot.
Circe is a feminist retelling of the life of the first daughter of Helios, the Greek goddess-witch Circe. Many heroic names from myth and legend make appearances throughout this story, but perhaps not in the ways you’d be used to hearing about them. Circe’s story is one that rejects patriarchal society and familial duty, and tells us that the bonds we choose will always be the ones that matter most. Circe’s story is riddled with sorrow, grief, and awful cruelty, yet above all else it is a monument to the strength of women.
My only beef with this book is that there was an excess of words — I have it on good authority that this is in fact just a trait of Madeline Miller’s writing, and so not really a gripe with the storytelling or anything. It did make reading this a bit of a slog though, and reading this took me far longer that it usually would for a book of this length. The excess of words also made for some interesting pacing, mainly in the beginning of the book, where I couldn’t struggle through this for more than a couple of chapters at a time because my eyes kept wandering off the page or getting lost mid-sentence. There just wasn’t a lot happening other than Circe’s observations of life around her and describing how terrible everyone else in her family is. The only bright point was Prometheus’s punishment, where finally we saw a breadcrumb of plot taking root. This definitely gets filed under slow beginnings for me, and if I hadn’t been so invested in the retelling then I might have given up entirely.
As an additional side note, I do also think this book lacked a bit of personality in the form of humour — this is not to say that I think there should have been jokes peppered in here because that’s not it at all. However, we were led to believe that Circe is the most humourless, dry, stick-in-the-mud person on the face of the earth, and I don’t think that’s fair. While the narrative focus here is on resilience and perseverance, I do think we could have done with a brief reprieve every now and then to take away from some of the intensity of the storytelling. We also know that Circe has a sense of humour, so I don’t think it’s a crime to show us that she was able to find the very few comical situations she was in amusing.
Is a background in classics necessary to read this book? I’m going to say no, but also it definitely does help. Once or twice I found myself giving Uncle Google a cheeky consultation because I just needed a 2 minute refresher on who this character was that had just popped up. This happened maybe only a couple of times, but again, only because I was familiar with the names and faces and didn’t want to be flying blind and placing them wrong in the story. Anyone without prior familiarity with the Odyssey and the Iliad will not have this problem, as everyone that crops up is given the exact correct amount of context and scene setting so you know only what you need to.
Overall I rate this 4/5 for cool story and motivation, but points deducted for being unnecessarily wordy.
