Book Review – Circe by Madeline Miller

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I've been wanting to read Circe, by Madeline Miller, since I first heard of it from one of my dearest friends, who had simply loved it. I thought about waiting for the pocket edition to be published, but then fell in love with the gorge design of the hard cover edition, and I decided to wait no more. I just had to buy and read it. Beautiful cover on a side, I absolutely loved this novel!

We are here in front of another re-telling, just as it happened with Kiersten White's Elizabeth Frankenstein. In her novel Madeline Miller explores the life of the witch Circe, famous to be a character appearing in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. For whom who cannot remember her, Circe is the witch turning men into pigs, and making Odysseus (or Ulysses) stay with her on the island of Aiaia far longer than he had planned.

And that is everything we know about her from the Odyssey. But what about her childhood? How did she become a witch? What did she do when Odysseus left the island?

Those are a few of the question to which Miller finds an answer in her novel, giving us a fabulous, complex portrait of the witch of Aiaia.

Part I – Childhood and discovery of her powers

Circe is the first daughter of the Titan Helios, god of the Sun, and a nymph, Perse. She is not particularly beautiful or bright, and her stunning mother, together with her big lot of aunties, cousins and relative gods, never waist an occasion to remind her how common, plain and dull she is. Her childhood though is not happy, not even when her siblings are born. They all seem to shine so much brighter than her, and always mock and prank their older sister.

Her only companion is her youngest brother, Aaeries, the most powerful and brightest among her siblings. He too will be destined to abandon her.

The very turn in her life happens when she first meets a human fisherman, Glaucos. They soon become friends, and Circe falls in love with him. She begs her grandmother to turn him into a god, so they can be together for ever, but she says that nobody can turn a human into a god.

Circe though once heard one of her uncles talking of certain plants, grown there where god's blood spilled, which had magic powers. She found the flowers, and prayed for them to turn her beloved into a god. It worked. Glaucos became a god, and Circe let everybody believe he was simply destined to become so, keeping her secret plants for herself.

But once full of power, Glaucos forgets about Circe, and decides to marry the beautiful nymph Scylla instead. Scylla is indeed gorgeous, but she is malicious, evil, jealous. Blinded by anger and disappointment, Circe uses her plants again, to make Scylla's aspect as ugly as her soul. But the spell goes a bit too further, and Scylla becomes an horrendous monster with six heads, hungry for human flesh.

Part II – The exile

Shocked by the turn of her doing, and still disappointed at Glaucos, who then focuses his attention on another pretty nymph, Circe decides to admit to her father that both Glaucos being a god and Scylla a monster are her doings. Nobody believes her, where might the dull, silly Circe take the power of a god? But her brother Aaeries appears, and states in front of everybody that yes, his sister has power, such as his and their other siblings. They are the first of their kind, so powerful to threaten a god.

The news arrives to Zeus, god of all gods, and he is not happy. Helios and Zeus then decide what to do with her, and send her to exile, forever alone, on the island of Aiaia, where she won't hurt anybody. At beginning Circe is shocked with grief; she doesn't want to leave, she doesn't want to spend her life alone. But then she figures out that she really never was happy with her kins. Her life has always been miserable, so won't it be better to be alone on an island all for herself? She slowly comes to love her little reign, garden plants and trees, feed her animals, and sharpen her magic. She soon becomes the powerful witch she was meant to be.

Part III – Before, during and after Odysseus

So much happens to her from that moment on: she meets the great engineer Dedalus, she becomes lover with god Hermes, she helps her sister to give birth to abominable Minotaur, she decides to help some lost sails, but they take advantage of her, breaking her will in the most horrible way. That is the moment when she starts turning men into pigs.

Then Odysseus arrives, and she understands he is not like the others. She loves his telling, his stories of Ithaca, Troy, all the battles he had to fight, all the heroes he had met. She wouldn't want him to leave, but his men pressure him to go back to Ithaca, to their families. And so he leaves, without knowing that she kept a secret from him.

Years after, her fate will entangle again with Odysseus and his inheritance, and at the very last, when she will be forced to look at her doings in the face and put a stop to them, she will also need to take the greatest decision, and stop living her life as the Fates decided, but live it according to her own will.

I loved, loved, loved this novel. Circe is a complex, interesting character, who gets her strengths from her weaknesses, who makes mistakes, grows, faces them, mends them, makes more. She suffers, and her sufferings make her bigger, better. She fights without giving up, not even during the hardest time. A novel to read, absolutely, to fall in love with Greek mythology and to get to know the story of a woman who made herself one of the biggest witches of all times.

Let me know if you read this novel and if you loved it like I did. Or, if you didn't, what is that that you found not convincing? Talking to you very soon,

M.