Circe [en]

I absolutely loved this book! I don’t know where I heard about it or why I decided to buy it, but it is an enchanting book, a magical book, a book that makes me so happy that I want to read it all over again even though I just finished it!

The stories of the goddess Circe are not always good ones, but Madeleine Miller takes those stories, shaped by centuries of male writers, and rewrites them to show how independent, smart, courageous, loving, generous, feisty, and ultimately human Circe really was.

Unloved by her father, Helios, and despised by her mother, siblings, and other relatives, Circe is bored and lonely until she meets a mortal, Glaucus, whom she falls in love with. She then has the idea to transform Glaucus into a god and she does it, unsure of what she’s doing. But once Glaucus is a god, he becomes a jerk and falls in love with Scylla, who is beautiful and vain. Circe, enraged, decides to punish Scylla and transforms her into the man-eating monster that we know her to be today. That’s when Circe really understands that she has the power to transform humans, animals, and everything around her. Unfortunately, when she proudly tells her father about her newly-discovered power, he gets really angry and tells Zeus, who is even more angry and decides to ban her to a deserted island.

And so begins Circe’s life, alone on an island where she learns about the power of plants and spells, where boats full of cruel men crash on her shores, where human heroes and gods alike visit her (oh the stories my father read to us from Contes et légendes de la mythologie grecque when we were kids!), and where she discovers herself and her strengths, love and pain, sacrifice and survival, as well as sadness and joy, over many eventful centuries.

This book has been translated into French (and probably many other languages) but the English writing is lovely without being cheesy, poetic without being heavy. (What’s interesting is that the summaries written on different websites for the French translation of the book all contain mistakes, as if the authors had never read the book. It’s annoying and disappointing!) And it was a very human story, for a story about gods! The suspense made me want to read it as quickly as possible, yet the story was so vivid and fascinating that I wanted the book to never end.