Release Date: 29 April 2021 (received as advance read copy*)
Publisher: Headline
Star rating: 🌟🌟🌟 🌟
This book in 3 words: myth, sisterhood, betrayal
Read if you liked: Circe, The Silence of the Girls
Ariadne and Phaedra are sisters. They are also the daughters of King Minos, you know, of the Minotaur fame. Under Minos’ tyrannical reign, each year his conquered enemies, Athens, are forced to send human sacrifice to feed the Minotaur. But this time, a prince is on board who will change the sisters’ lives forever and set them on paths that will lead… only the Fates can tell.
Saint certainly picked a mythological story with a whole heap of dramatic moments to draw from. This is a tragic story, and one I know only from various Greek tragedies and other myths, so I was pleased to see the originality of the novel – this is a myth I haven’t seen retold before and I’m always excited to see a new take on the mythological traditions. Despite this, the novel was very much a slow burn for me, and it took a long time for me to feel I’d settled into a narrative I could lose myself in. I’ve noticed mythical retellings often have a couple of opening chapters of exposition ‘This happened, then this happened, and this, which led us to here’. And that is very much the case in Saint’s novel, where the opening chapters feel like a chapter out of a Greek mythology book, with the perspectives of course flipped to the women but really a set up to ‘what we already know’.
By Part II, things started to pick up and Saint’s writing blossoms, in my opinion. As the story shifted more from ‘this happened back in the day’ to ‘this is happening right now’, I found I cared more for the characters, I was interested in their emotions and Saint’s descriptions became more vivid and engaging. I particularly liked the introduction of Phaedra’s perspective, which brought a much needed alternative voice to the narrative and created some contrast and colour from Ariadne’s story. There were some lovely moments of dialogue in here and something truly ‘real’ in the way Saint captured motherhood, particularly, and its interplay with sisterhood.
This is a devastating story and the way the events unfolded gave enough twists and turns to be shocking. But the ending would have felt more devastating, I think, if I’d have really got to understand some of the relationships more deeply on a ‘human’ level. The relationship particularly between Theseus and Ariadne felt rushed, a means to an end to get to Part II of the story, but actually is a crucial catalyst in the events which follow that I wanted to feel in a more real way.
So, I’ve given this a 4 because of the way it ends – I really would recommend for fans of Circe and The Silence of the Girls. As a book within the canon of modern myth retellings, it stands up for itself and stakes its claim on an as yet untold story in an interesting way. I’d love to know what you think!
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*Thanks NetGalley and Headline for allowing me free access to this advance read copy in exchange for an honest review!
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