The Witch Who Turned Percy Jackson into a Guinea Pig: A Review of Circe by Madeline Miller

Women in history and in fiction very rarely have their stories told properly or with sympathy. Oftentimes, when women take agency over their own lives, society casts them aside and they are remembered as villains and cautionary tales. In recent years, many of the stories of these women who have been known as villains have been reimagined and retold with varying degrees of complexity and success. I’m a huge fan of the genre of retelling famous myths and legends through a new, alternative lens, but a common pitfall of this genre is that in attempting to redeem or cast a new light on these characters or historical figures, they become flat or symbolic; the author uses these characters to teach the audience a lesson, instead of humanizing them, albeit the fact the lesson is contrary to what those characters were originally supposed to represent. Picking up Circe, I was worried that this would be the case, but I really loved The Song of Achilles, written by the same author, so I went for it.


In Circe, Madeline Miller tells the story of the famous villain in the Odyssey, the sorceress Circe who keeps Odysseus captive and turns his men into pigs. In many iterations of the Odyssey, Circe is cast as an unreasonable and unrelenting witch, who keeps Odysseus for herself, away from his loving wife at home in Ithaca. Western study of the classics and philosophy exemplifies Circe as the archetype of a sexually free women, who is evil and keeps men for her own purposes. Miller, while staying true to the events of the Odyssey, challenges this archetype and tells Circe’s story in a much more sympathetic light. She follows Circe from her birth to the events shortly following the conclusion of the Odyssey, drawing from various Greek myths and philosophy, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Miller has an incredible writing style and does an amazing job humanizing Circe. Circe stood out to me as a retelling of a story of a woman who has been often cast as the villain because Miller doesn’t shy away from the atrocities that Circe has done. While Circe hurts and kills others for reasons justified at times, she also does so out of pettiness or simply because she enjoys wielding her power. Miller never attempts to cast Circe as the victim in these parts, and instead recognizes her as worthy of compassion in all her complexity even without repentance for her actions. Along the way, Miller also manages to explore the theme of immortality and what life means when no matter what you do, you can not be harmed or killed - and when faced with eternity, what is the value of change?


Fans of Percy Jackson & the Olympians will enjoy Circe, and similarly no background knowledge of Greek mythology is needed. Circe is an incredible book and I highly recommend it as a summer read.