Ironically enough, reading about a God or immortal being highlights the benefits of mortality. With our expiration dates fast approaching, we’re forced to bend and yield to life’s occasions and to those around us. Without such, we would have no need to morph for love or shift for our family and friends. Experiences would have no weight without a tracker to count when it would be our last one, our last sunset or snow.
Relationships wouldn’t be a choice, they’d be a force of nature. Sewn together in the graveyard of stories and legends, people come and go, but Titans and Olympians are forever.
Or so it seems, but rather than give away too much of this already well-known story, I’m left to wonder whether this incarnation of Greek mythology is a little too late. For centuries we have read our greek stories and legends as close to their original format as possible, excusing translations between languages and older syntax patterns.
But now, in the age of bingeing and streaming, how well known is this manifestation of Circe? Or how well known is Circe in general, without a Netflix original series dedicated to her, is it too little, too late for these pages?
Segueing pass the death of reading and one another, this book is very well written. So if you dare open the hardcover for a change of pace, you’ll be transported to the pearly halls of Helios. Between the kingdom hopping chapters, one discovers more than the legend of Circe and Titanomachy, but the minotaur and Icarus. With every turn of the page, there is a new legend that prods at the corners of your mind, a half-remembered lesson from flying too close to the sun or poking at forces that one does not truly understand. As Odysseus did, in many times to his own downfall, here is the other bard’s characterization of his nature and Ithaca. As with nearly all Greek mythology, you cannot read one tale without heavy references to another. This is more than a tale of Circe, but a tale of Greek mythology itself.
Art in Your World 