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Ariadne: The Mesmerising Sunday Times Bestselling Retelling of Ancient Greek Myth

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Jennifer Saint's Ariadne is a shimmering tapestry of two sisters bound by deceit and the shadows of family history. ARIADNE gives a voice to the forgotten women of one of the most famous Greek myths, and speaks to their strength in the face of angry, petulant Gods.

Beautifully written and nuanced, Ariadne explores the bonds between women and their epic quest for agency in patriarchal Greek society. However, the focus on Phaedra does provide a dramatic tension that events on Naxos just don’t have despite the author’s efforts. In Theseus’ most famous escapade, that of him confronting the minotaur and freeing Athens from the power of Knossos, Ariadne has a vitally instrumental role. But Pasiphae shrank and became smaller every day, even while her belly stretched and grew oddly misshapen with her strange baby.

The wails must have filled the air as mothers watched their children sicken and die before their eyes, soldiers slumped across the battlefields, and the mighty city—which found that it was, like all cities, made strong only by weak, human flesh—began to sink beneath the piled-up corpses of the plague my father had brought. This means that the bulk of the novel is concerned with Ariadne’s seclusion upon Naxos, married to Dionysius. Defying the gods, betraying her family and country, and risking everything for love, Ariadne helps Theseus kill the Minotaur. My younger sister, Phaedra, toddled enraptured in his wake, and when I grew tired of steering her away from every danger she could find, I would leave Daedalus with them both and steal back to the wide circle of my dancing-floor.

Even without music it could muffle the distant rumble that groaned beneath our feet and the skitter of tremendous hooves far below the ground at the heart of the construction that had truly cemented Daedalus’ fame. There is more telling than showing, and characters launch into soliloquies that might make sense in a Greek tragedy but are out of place here.The most famous part of Ariadne's story, helping Theseus escape the labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur, is only the beginning of this sweeping mythological novel. One of the difficulties of working with familiar figures and well-known tropes is making them fresh. Leaving Minos untouched but disgracing his wife in so grotesque a fashion humbled the man—cuckolded by a dumb beast and wedded to a woman frenzied with unnatural desires. After thirteen years as a high school English teacher, she wrote ARIADNE which tells the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur from the perspective of Ariadne - the woman who made it happen.

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