Circe Book Review: The Witch Who Refused to Be a Footnote

Luke Stoffel
3 days ago
3 min read

Rating: ★★★★★

Boy, Refracted by Luke Stoffel - Book Review

"Circe" Book Review:

Circe is the daughter of Helios, a Titan. She's born into a family that measures worth by power, radiance, the ability to make mortals tremble. And she has none of it. Her voice is too thin. Her face is too mortal. Her family openly despises her. So she does what any self-respecting outcast would do: she discovers witchcraft and terrifies everyone who underestimated her.

Madeline Miller is a classicist who taught Latin and Greek for years before she ever published fiction. Her first novel, The Song of Achilles, reimagined the Trojan War through the lens of Achilles and Patroclus's love story and won the Orange Prize. With Circe, she does something equally ambitious but structurally different. Where Achilles was a tragedy hurtling toward a known ending, Circe is a slow unfolding. A woman exiled to an island, living through centuries, encountering the myths we already know — Odysseus, Daedalus, the Minotaur, Scylla — and finding her own story woven between them.

What Miller does better than almost anyone writing mythological fiction is make you feel the weight of immortality. Circe lives for thousands of years, and that's not glamorous here. It's lonely. It's watching everyone you love age and die while you stay the same. It's having centuries of solitude to figure out who you are when no one's watching. Miller writes that loneliness with such empathy that you forget you're reading about a goddess. Circe feels deeply, stubbornly human.

Perdita Weeks narrates the audiobook with exactly the right combination of otherworldly and grounded. Her voice has this quiet authority — she sounds ancient and immediate at the same time.

The feminist reading is obvious — a woman claiming her power in a world that wants her silent — but Miller never reduces Circe to a message. She's complicated. She's sometimes cruel, sometimes naive, always growing. The book asks what kind of person you'd become if you had forever to figure it out, and the answer Miller arrives at is quietly devastating.

If you loved The Song of Achilles, this is Miller working at the same level with a very different kind of protagonist. Where Achilles was about burning bright and fast, Circe is about the slow, stubborn work of becoming yourself. Five stars. Essential.

If You Liked Circe, Try:

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker — The Trojan War from Briseis's perspective. Same project of reclaiming a woman's story from mythology's margins, with a harder, angrier edge.
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint — The myth of the Minotaur told through the women who lived it. If Circe made you hungry for more feminist retellings of Greek myth, this delivers.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke — A completely different setting but the same feeling of one person alone in a vast, strange world, slowly piecing together who they are.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If this book review resonated with you, check out The Warboy Chronicles — a series that shares Crichton's obsession with what happens when you create intelligence you cannot control, including a sentient AI that starts thinking for itself in ways its creator never intended. thewarboychronicles.com