Book Review: Madeline Miller - Circe

I really enjoy the various spinoffs, tributes, and fanfictions based on Greek mythology, and though I'm sure it's theoretically possible to tire of yet another derivative of these stories, I'm still impressed with how creative people are still able to be with this millennia-old material. To my knowledge, Circe is the first novel to concentrate solely on its protagonist's life story as a tale unto itself, and Miller takes Circe's appearances in the Homer's Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony (or what's known of it) to portray her youth, exile, motherhood, and exit from Aiaia as a full narrative. It's not high-concept short stories, like Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, or an overwhelming modernist juggernaut, like James Joyce's Ulysses, or even a mock-drama, like Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, but a humble traditional novel about the relationships of parents to their children: Circe and Helios, Telegonus and Circe, Telemachus and Odysseus. I actually had not heard of the Telegony before reading this, so the full story of her and Odysseus' son Telegonus, and Circe's eventual romance with Odysseus' other son Telemachus, were new to me, and whereas in the Odyssey Circe is merely a pleasant stop for Odysseus on his way home, here Odysseus, with a well-captured dark side, is the key to her release from her long exile but far from the only part of her life with meaning. I don't think people will stop being fascinated by the caprices of the gods for many years yet, but Miller makes their human side not just understandable but even relatable.