Sunday, April 7, 2019

Eight novels that reexamine literature from the margins

Katharine Duckett hails from East Tennessee, has lived in Turkey and Kazakhstan, and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she majored in minotaurs. Miranda in Milan is her first novel.

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog she tagged eight "compelling literary works that reimagine the experiences of women who were silenced, sidelined, or slandered in their original appearances in the canon." One title on the list:
Circe, by Madeleine Miller

Circe is an antagonist of The Odyssey, a predatory woman who transforms Odysseus’s crew into swine when they have the misfortune of visiting her island and turns a romantic rival into a monster with the use of poison. But Miller gives us a more nuanced view of the daughter of Helios, making her into both a believable woman and a being whose concerns and views on the nature of her story extend beyond the mortal world. Miller, who also gave Achilles and Patroclus a love story in her first book, The Song of Achilles, infuses Circe with mythological allusions and inventive twists on the old gods and demigods of Greece.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Circe is among Steph Posts' thirteen top novels set in the world of myth.

--Marshal Zeringue