Circe by Madeline Miller

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.

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With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man's world.

Why I Picked It Up

I've been in a Greek mythology and classics phase—a recurrence, for sure! Every few years, probably. Right now, my particular fixation is on the way we've defined the hero's journey to include necessary trials or suffering, how we determine what to return to, self-fulfilling prophecy, etc. (Shocker! I've known for forever that I can be rather Calvinist in terms of earning rest or relief myself, but I do try to unravel that.)

I recently read Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, revisited Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and her follow-up Red Doc>, mused over sirens for the zero draft of my next book, etc. Some is research; some is pleasure. My next book has influence, but is not a retelling.

Mainly, I was book-clubbing with one of my closest friends over the phone; she'd finished Why We Swim at my recommendation (she was an All-American swimmer in college) and we'd talked for an hour about it and everything else we'd been reading lately.

She just finished The Song of Achilles, Miller's first book, and it reminded me that Circe has been on my shelf for forever. It's the solid definition of a rainy-day read for me: popular enough that I just assume I'll get around to it at a certain point, but completely forget to because I never prioritize it. I felt the same way about Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid and entirely loved it.

So Circe went back on the list.

About the Book

Circe is intended to be a feminist retelling of the goddess/witch from The Odyssey. She turns rogue sailors into pigs (in this one, after they attack her and she realizes how despicable men can be when they find a woman alone) and deals with her exile at her distant shoreline. She occasionally takes a lover.

The book's plot stems from when she meets Odysseus, which happens at maybe around 50 to 60% into the narrative? Without spoilers, the ripple effect from their encounter affects the myths of Scylla, Trygon, Telemachus, etc.

The retelling is meant to be an internal character study, so following her evolution throughout tinged by some of the themes that the original myths deal with: women as disposable war trophies, the curse of time passing, fates you can't escape, etc.

Pacing & Storytelling

I was so not into this book for the first 50 percent or so of it. I ended up enjoying it by the end, as the second half was a lot more direct, involved, connected, etc. I'm not entirely sure whether I was just so relieved the book got better, or whether I genuinely thought it was good enough by the end.

Having just read The Odyssey and The Iliad, I'm very up to speed on their happenings and just didn't think Circe added much to the story? I didn't think the language was stunning, or that the interpretation felt fresh.

Obviously, I'm familiar with the legend of Circe, but I also just didn't think this take added anything new—which is fine!—and if it didn't, I wanted the format or execution to be beautiful or graceful or in some way compelling. But between that straightforwardness and the dull narration besides, I just didn't really care. People praise the prose and atmosphere, so I went in with high hopes that were not delivered. (This is where expectation matching matters so much for any given book.)

I don't automatically hate austere or even minimalistic prose. At the very least, it's neutral to me; at best, it's rich in the way Alice Munro might be, with a sense of energy behind what goes unsaid. But there's a difference between an author playing with the gaps, layers, etc. behind their words versus just narrating on a surface-level for no good (discernible) reason. Circe just entirely lacked emotion or propulsion for me, and so everything plodded.

The storytelling read as boring, not intentionally restrained, and I did have the suspicion that it wouldn't make it past modern gatekeepers (i.e. an agent's inbox) based on its strengths if not for the success of The Song of Achilles. I don't mean to sound scathing by saying that; my impression was just that there wasn't...much...to this one.

It's supposed to be a very feminist retelling, and I didn't get much of that either beyond the actual happenings of the plot. I didn't need that, but I was surprised by readers praising Circe as powerful on that front. (Within publishing, "female rage" has been a buzzy term for the last few years, which tends to have a very specific aesthetic—not one I seek consciously.) One of the bits of The Iliad that's hardest to read is the dehumanization of women, and how the men involved only view each other as real and deserving of respect. That happens in plenty of narratives, for sure, but it's especially prevalent in The Iliad because of its emphasis on vividness, glory, the definition of heroism, etc. whereas all the heroes can expendably kill and rape the women involved without it diminishing their perceived value. Women, symbolically, are property, which historically aligns. Other people don't matter beyond their own pride (extended to their protection of their men), which is a complicated issue on the battlefield.

I see how that theme's maybe informed Circe (and Miller teaches the classics), but it's not particularly revolutionary either; I don't see Circe as having flipped that or added much to the conversation there, because she still wasn't really much of a character beyond her relationships with the men involved with what's—perceivably—the actual story. So she might just be intensifying that flavor of misogyny too? That angle felt pretty watered down, if present at all.

Voice & Tone

You may not be able to separate the two, but a lot of me pushing further into it was sheer stubbornness, which is absolutely due to the popularity of the book and author and not the narrative's own merit. If it were a blind test, I would have put this book down at page fifty and not thought of it again (but again, books don't exist in a vacuum.)

I recently read a craft book that had me thinking a lot about how we treat books differently depending on how much we believe stylistic choices are intentional, and this book is a great example.

When poking through reviews after finishing it, I saw plenty of reviewers go, "Oh, the voice is stiff and distant because it's meant to convey the immortal detachment of Circe." Which, sure, I'm sure there's a healthy dose of that. But also, I still thought the tone was ineffective and the prose was awkward. Sorry. Clearly, it still has some it-factor that allows it to attract readers, so more power to it.

I do feel like I'm a pretty generous reader in that I'll try to look for details to like in writing—pacing, maybe? Word choice? A particular flair or aspect of the voice? But Circe just didn't seem to be anything new either, so even its observations just felt a little bland.

"I felt X. I felt Y. This happened. I knew Z."

Telling has its place, but when it's the entire book—that just reads to me like the storytelling is lacking because it can't situate the reader in the events.

Okay, Circe is sad. Circe is now angry. Why should I care if you haven't made me feel or connect to anything about the story or its participants? Any story that's character-driven should have enough complexity or contradiction or enough emotional immersion to comprise a plot in itself. The character is the plot—not the plot is just missing.

Frankly, there's even a way to execute this type of retelling—a distant, adjacent, overlooked female character used as a tool for the main hero but ultimately left wanting. That's been done (beautifully) before in one of my favorite books, Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson, which manages to handle all of the same concepts: agelessness vs. mortality, the chase and restlessness of the main hero, being the one he pauses on, the anger and restraint of women doing the work for men without any thanks.

(Even narrated by a side character without the same emotion, the bittersweet tone manages to swell beneath each action. So I do think that the flaws I read in Circe are more due to execution than anything else, and it may just not be the book for me. Distant can be done well when there's room for the reader to project their own thoughts and feelings onto the narrator, because books are a two-way street.)

Also, this is a small pet peeve of mine, but often when an author doesn't use contractions, it just feels clunky to me, like they're trying so hard to maintain a formal or timeless voice and that's the only way they know how.

Lines & Thoughts I Loved

“Do not try to take my regret from me.”

“When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.”

“Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking the bright air until the stars went dark.”

“He was finished with me too, for I had committed the unpardonable sin of being dull.”

“The generals take the credit, of course, and indeed they provide the gold. But they are always calling you into their tent and asking for reports of what you're doing instead of letting you go do it.”

“There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story's end, or else upheld at great cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. He would have always been looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. ”

(Recently, I feel like I've loved and connected to characters who are honest and genuine enough that this paradoxically makes others suspicious; I've highlighted that quality in a ton of books recently.)

“All those years of pain and wandering. Why? For a moment's pride.”

Overall Thoughts

Like I said, I enjoyed the back half of the book plenty once the plots started bumping together. I still don't necessarily think that was enough, so I'm admittedly a little confused by the book's popularity; for me, it may seem to be a buzz-feeds-buzz scenario.

I'm all about a straightforward Greek myth retelling, but I supposed I'd been expecting some more pizzazz, plot, or character intrigue to carry it forward more so than my fondness for the familiarity of the myth keeping me reading.

I solidly liked the end of the book, but overall it was a tad lackluster for me. I still might find myself recommending it to others depending on how they describe their individual tastes, but it doesn't entirely align with mine.

For fans of:

The Odyssey by Emily Wilson (obviously); Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson; Lifestyles of Gods & Monsters by Emily Roberson; etc.