Pages: 368
Published: 15th September 2022
Genre: Mythological Fiction
Content warnings: Misogyny, sexual exploitation
Medusa is the sole mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her Gorgon sisters, she begins to realize that she is the only one who experiences change, the only one who can be hurt. And her mortal lifespan gives her an urgency that her family will never know.
When the sea god Poseidon commits an unforgivable act in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can – and Medusa is changed forever. Writhing snakes replace her hair, and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. The power cannot be controlled: Medusa can look at nothing without destroying it. She is condemned to a life of shadows and darkness.
Until Perseus embarks upon a quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon…
I had very high hopes for this one. It felt like I had taken far too long to pick up another book by Natalie Haynes having really enjoyed A Thousand Ships back in 2021, becoming utterly enthralled by the stories finally being told of the women affected by the Trojan War. That was written powerfully and compellingly, but not without a dash of humour and creativity. This, however, was much less of a beguiling read.
All of the things that made A Thousand Ships so engaging are strangely missing here. The characters do not leave their mark in anything like the same way, and there is little of the emotional depth that you so often get from retellings of Greek mythology. This is disappointing, as there is vast potential for this in the story that the author is trying to tell.
The biggest frustration is that for a book that is billed as Medusa’s story, we surprisingly do not see much of Medusa herself. We get little snippets of her life and several scenes of her two Gorgon sisters fretting over her safety, but nothing that made me feel connected to the story. A lot of the rest of the narrative is irreverent, focusing on other characters such as Zeus and Poseidon, which I simply did not care a great deal for.
Haynes is a talented author who approaches her tales with plenty of wit, but here most of it just feels misguided. The moments that we do see of Medusa and her sisters are good, and they should have been the centrepiece of the story rather than just one component part. Even if some of the passages involving Zeus do raise the odd smile here and there, they arguably do not belong in this particular book.
Mainly due to those factors, the book did not grab me at all. For the first 100 pages I was waiting for that moment where things would click and I became absorbed, but sadly that just did not happen and eventually I found myself skim reading. If anything, it grew less and less interesting as the pages went by and it was ultimately a case of getting to the end.
While this book is approached with an appreciably feminist lens and there is never any doubting the horror of what happened to Medusa, there are other books that have portrayed it much more strongly. Jessie Burton’s Medusa is one the most beautiful novellas I have ever read and I fell wholly in love with it, so the story was not the issue for me here, only the way it was written.
Overall, this was undoubtedly a letdown. There was nothing to spark this story into life from my point of view and when you consider that the subject is Medusa, that is massively unexpected. The gentle humour and reflectiveness with which Haynes infuses her writing is definitely there in glimpses, but the execution is lacking and above all – in an increasingly crowded genre – it is rather forgettable.
This was quite a negative review. The main reasons why are that I had high expectations and for a 368-page book that I only recently read, I do not remember much about it. However, I am sure that others will like it more than I did.
My rating: ⭐⭐.5
