Circe by Madeline Miller

 

 

Circe by Madeline Miller

I bought this for my daughter a couple of years back thinking that with her love of mythology she was bound to like it. She did, and has been insisting since that I should read it too. Which I finally did over the winter break. It was hard for me not to compare it to the Ithaca trilogy which I really enjoyed last year, although by definition Circe has a lot more of the mythological and divine. I have to admit that the first half failed to really take me in, to the point where I thought I would not enjoy it much. But there's a shift at the point where Circe meets Ulysses (which was the only part of the myths associated to her I knew about) and suddenly it becomes a lot more powerful and gripping. I rushed through the last 150 pages and really loved the ending. Which goes to show you shouldn't judge a book by it's first 150 pages.