Book #16 of 2025: The Last Song of Penelope by Claire North (The Songs of Penelope #3) Easily the best installment of its trilogy, and not only for finally dealing with the most exciting sequence of the plot, when the wayward king Odysseus returns home to Ithaca and defeats the perfidious rivals for his wife’s …
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Book #3 of 2025: House of Odysseus by Claire North (The Songs of Penelope #2) Unfortunately not as gripping as the first book in the series, though just as committed to its feminist reclamation of Penelope’s traditional narrative. The problem here is that the previous volume already established her basic status quo keeping the suitors …
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Book #180 of 2024: Ithaca by Claire North (The Songs of Penelope #1) An extraordinarily effective Greek mythology retelling, centering on the character Penelope and the wider kingdom around her while her husband Odysseus is still lost at sea following the victory at Troy. (He’s been gone for 17 years, placing this novel roughly three …
Book #131 of 2023: Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine I’ve generally been enjoying the recent cottage industry kicked off by the popularity of Madeline Miller’s Circe in 2018, wherein ancient Greek myths are given novel-length treatment and in the process often reapproached with a feminist lens. On the surface, this title is just …
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Book #123 of 2022: Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes An interesting collection of essays, each one focusing on a different woman from Greek mythology and exploring how she’s changed from her earliest surviving depictions through to popular culture impressions today. The focus of the project is already somewhat automatically feminist, …
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Book #248 of 2021: Ariadne by Jennifer Saint The latest Greek myth to be retold as an extended novel, in the way that Madeline Miller famously did for Circe in 2018. This effort doesn’t soar quite as much as that one in either the quality of its prose or its basic character and plot work, …
Book #53 of 2021: A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes Everybody seems to be comparing this book to Madeline Miller’s Circe, and the similarities are admittedly striking between the two feminist retellings of Greek myth. But I think this title asks more of its readers in terms of bringing prior knowledge of the old stories …
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Book #14 of 2020: The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #5) The action in this series finale is suitably epic, and the parallels to the Trojan War are cute if a little distracting. (These characters all either know a lot about Greek mythology or are the actual mythic figures themselves. …
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Book #229 of 2019: The Titan’s Curse by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #3) I still sort of feel like I’m waiting for the Percy Jackson series to really hit its stride, but this third novel offers enough character growth and plot progression amid the latest romp through Greek mythology that I’m happy …
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Book #207 of 2019: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #2) This Percy Jackson sequel is a decent follow-up, but with a lot of issues that bother me, especially in a book aimed at younger readers. (As with early Harry Potter, the series sort of straddles the line between …
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