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

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this book is the perfect addition to my greek mythology shelf and fits right in with ‘circe,’ ‘the silence of girls,’ and ‘a thousand ships.’ I am a huge fan of Greek mythology and have been for years. The tale of Ariadne and Dionysus was always one of my favorites, so I leaped on this book the second I saw it, and though it started off strong, it was ultimately very disappointing to me. Ariadne realizes that there is a darker side to the stories of gods and men. Discuss some examples from the novel that bear this out. Is there still a tendency in our culture to valorize men while ignoring women's pain?

The mesmerising retelling from the woman at the heart of one of Ancient Greece’s most famous myths.** Minos put Ariadne in charge of the labyrinth where sacrifices were made as part of reparations either to Poseidon or Athena, depending on the version of the myth; later, she helped Theseus conquer the Minotaur and save the children from sacrifice. In other narrations she was the bride of Dionysus, her status as mortal or divine varying in those accounts. [16] [17] Minos and Theseus [ edit ] The married couple is ubiquitous in Etruscan art. It is appropriate to the social situation of the Etruscan aristocracy, in which the wife's family played as important a role in the family's genealogy as that of the husband." (Bonfante and Swaddling, 2006, 51f.).This book reminded me of “Circe” by Madeline Miller, especially as both characters find themselves alone on an island. I’d say read this if you also loved Circe.

I would not say this was a feminist retelling in any way, honestly, so I would warn others who might read it for such things (as it has been advertised as such) as Ariadne makes one decision in the beginning of the book and then becomes a brittle leaf in the wind, blowing which ever way at the mercy of the men around her. Karl Kerenyi and Robert Graves theorized that Ariadne, whose name they thought derived from Hesychius' enumeration of "Άδνον", a Cretan-Greek form of " arihagne" ("utterly pure"), was a Great Goddess of Crete, "the first divine personage of Greek mythology to be immediately recognized in Crete", [29] once archaeological investigation began. Kerenyi observed that her name was merely an epithet and claimed that she was originally the "Mistress of the Labyrinth", both a winding dancing ground and, in the Greek opinion, a prison with the dreaded Minotaur in its centre. Kerenyi explained that a Linear B inscription from Knossos "to all the gods, honey… [,] to the mistress of the labyrinth honey" in equal amounts, implied to him that the Mistress of the Labyrinth was a Great Goddess in her own right. [30] Professor Barry Powell suggested that she was the Snake Goddess of Minoan Crete. [31] The atmosphere of the book was beautiful and I'll give it some extra points because even though it had all the rights to be a heavy one, it wasn't. Everything felt natural, very Greek if you want, and the story fell nicely into a fluid pace.It’s just really a shame because as much as I dislike “and they lived happily ever after” because I don’t mind a bit of pain, I REALLY don’t like to read about all women needlessly suffering at the hands of or because of men and that being the only message I take away from this novel when it was advertised as a “brilliant feminist debut” and WHEN THERE WAS AN AMAZING ALTERNATIVE WITHIN ESTABLISHED MYTHOLOGY.