Circe

Circe is Madeline Miller's 2018 second novel, the Goodreads Choice winner and the canonical contemporary feminist mythic re-telling. Circe, the daughter of the sun god Helios and the nymph Perse, narrates her own life from her early childhood in her father's palace through her exile to the island of Aiaia for the crime of practicing witchcraft. The novel covers the events of the Odyssey from Circe's perspective (Odysseus's year on the island, the relationship that produces Telegonus), the events of the Telegony cycle, and the entire mythic-time arc through Circe's eventual choice about her own immortality.

Miller's discipline as a classicist is the structural advantage of the novel. The mythic-time scale (Circe lives across the entire arc of the Trojan War cycle, the eras of multiple human generations, the rise and decline of the gods) is handled with the kind of patient pacing that contemporary fantasy rarely commits to. The Pasiphae chapters that produce the Minotaur are some of the strongest mythic-realist prose in contemporary American literary fiction. The Daedalus subplot is handled with a moral seriousness the original mythic cycle does not assign it. The novel's structural pivot in the back third (the encounter with Telemachus, the question of Circe's relationship to mortality) earns the gut-punch the reader has been promised since page one.

Recommended as required contemporary literary fiction reading, as the more-mature follow-up to The Song of Achilles for readers ready to start with the harder novel, and as the central text of the contemporary mythic re-telling subgenre. Compare to Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls and Women of Troy, Natalie Haynes's A Thousand Ships, and Jennifer Saint's Ariadne and Elektra. The Perdita Weeks audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.