Circe is a tale of strength and self-love and I’m not sure I’ll ever stop thinking about it.

Miller ingeniously weaves together the stories and legends of the Greek gods we know well; the result being a magnificent tapestry of power, joy, love, lust and deceit. She expertly crafts Homeric attributes into each of the characters and like all great Greek mythology this book is filled with monsters, magic and betrayal.

There’s a difference though, Miller (as Miller usually does), turns this tale into a feminist retelling of the goddess Circe. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Circe is a temptress, an evil nymph who uses her sexual prowess to trick Odysseus into staying on her Island. The Island where she was banished to by her own father.

In this retelling, Circe is a complex heroine who has faced painful hardships. It’s a tale of strength, of self-love and of motherhood. And between all that, it’s a commentary of how females have been portrayed in literature throughout history.

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”

Madeline Miller writes beautifully in this epic tale of Circe; a daughter born into the house of Helios, god of the sun. Her prose is almost poetic and lyrical, with sentences rolling off the tongue. When Circe is born, she is immediately outcast, bullied and belittled by the other Gods. She isn’t like them. She spends her life trying to make her father love her. Until one day, she begins to perform witchcraft. Quickly, she is banished to a remote Island to live an immortal life of solitude, because if it’s one thing that the gods fear, it’s witches.

What I loved most about Circe, is that Miller portrays the female characters as complex and the men (most of them) as self-conceited and egotistic. Odysseus is no longer the benevolent hero we have known him to be and women are no longer weak creatures whose sexuality ought to be both politicised and vilified. In this tale, femininity and female independence is powerful.

“It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did.”

I first read this last summer and I haven’t stopped thinking about it, or talking about it. I’m not sure I ever will.

All I can say is, READ IT.