by Madeline Miller
First sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.”
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Content: There is a lot of violence, a rape scene, and some references to sex. It’s in the adult fiction section of the bookstore, but I’d give it to an interested high schooler.

I am not overly familiar with Circe’s myth. As one of our customers said, when I mentioned that I was reading this book, “she’s the one who turned men into pigs, right?” That’s pretty much all I knew.

So, I was taken with Miller’s re-imagining of this myth. (And since I didn’t have anything to compare it to, I was a blank slate.) Circe was an interesting character (if a bit annoying at times), and I really loved her slow growth arc, how she went from being a clueless daughter of the god Helios to a witch to a woman with a confidence in her own abilities. I liked the details that Miller put in; you could tell she’s a scholar of the mythology, and she handled the huge cast of characters extremely well. It was a bit slow in the middle, when Circe was exiled to her island, but nothing much else was going on, but once Odysseus showed up, it picked back up again.

All of this to say: I really enjoyed this one a lot!