I read the first three chapters of Circe in a bathtub, water going cold, without noticing. That was four years ago, and I still haven’t fully surfaced. Madeline Miller’s novel is the rare kind of book that doesn’t just tell you a story. It reorders something inside you, quietly, the way Circe herself learns to reorder the world with her herbs and incantations.
But here’s the question that kept nagging at me long after I finished: what does it mean for a woman to become her truest self when every version of that self has been shaped by the men who feared her, used her, or tried to cage her?
The Daughter Nobody Saw
Circe begins as the least of the lesser gods. Daughter of Helios, the sun Titan, she is plain where her siblings are radiant, mortal-voiced where gods should boom, and perpetually overlooked. She’s the kind of girl who exists in the margins of her own family portrait, and Miller makes us feel every inch of that erasure.
What struck me most was how Circe’s transformation mirrors something I recognize. She doesn’t wake up powerful one day. She fumbles, experiments, fails spectacularly. When she tries to make a mortal fisherman into a god, she accidentally turns him into a sea creature instead. When she’s violated and humiliated, she doesn’t get a satisfying revenge. She gets exile to a lonely island.
And then she builds. She learns the plants, the spells, the rhythms of solitude. She tames lions. She creates a home. When Odysseus’s men arrive and behave like, well, men, she turns them into pigs. Miller’s genius here is that the transformation is never punishment. It’s revelation. The flowers don’t impose a shape on anyone. They reveal what was already there.
I kept thinking about my own grandmother, who outlived three husbands and learned to keep her power subtle enough that nobody noticed it until it was too late. She never turned anyone into swine, as far as I know. But she understood something Circe does too: when you’re underestimated, you have room to become dangerous.
The Freedom of Becoming
The core image of this book, for me, is transformation itself. Miller uses it over and over, from the literal turning of men into pigs to the more subtle shifts in Circe’s own character. She watches her sister give birth to the Minotaur. She watches Icarus fall. She watches mortals age and die while she stays static as stone.
This is where the novel’s argument sharpens. Circe’s power isn’t really about magic. It’s about the terrifying freedom of becoming whoever you decide to be, regardless of what the gods expect or what the world demands. The gods in Miller’s telling are monstrous children, vain and cruel and incapable of real love. Circe’s tragedy is that she’s a god who wants mortal things: connection, meaning, the messy business of caring for someone who will inevitably leave you.
There’s a moment when Circe says she wishes she could die, and I felt that in my chest. Immortality, in Miller’s hands, isn’t a gift. It’s a sentence. The only escape is to become something the gods can’t understand. A witch. A mother. A woman who chooses her own exile and makes it a kingdom.
What Miller does so well is make this ancient myth feel like a map of modern womanhood. The way Circe is dismissed, gaslit, punished for her ambition, and then feared when she finally claims her own strength—that pattern hasn’t changed. It’s just wearing different clothes.
A Spell I’m Still Under
Circe is not a comfortable book. Miller doesn’t let her heroine off easy, and she doesn’t let the reader either. There are moments of genuine horror here, and the depiction of gods as capricious abusers is unflinching. I had to put the book down twice, not because it was badly written, but because it was too true.
What the book does exceptionally well is give voice to someone who was always a footnote in someone else’s epic. Odysseus gets his Odyssey. Circe gets a paragraph. Miller reverses that hierarchy with breathtaking skill, and in doing so, she writes every silenced woman back into her own story.
The prose is worth mentioning separately. Miller writes sentences you want to eat—rich and strange and precise. She doesn’t overdo the lyricism. She lets the starkness of Circe’s world speak for itself, and it’s all the more powerful for that restraint.
If you’re someone who loves Greek mythology and wants to see it from a fresh angle, this book will reward you deeply. If you’re a woman who has ever been told she’s too much or not enough, it will feel like a mirror. If you’re a man who wants to understand what it feels like to be dismissed and underestimated, you might learn something here too.
The book isn’t for everyone. It’s slow in places, and if you need constant action, you’ll be frustrated. The first third of the novel is essentially Circe’s childhood and exile, and some readers find that pacing difficult. But for those who stay, the payoff is immense.
I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I’ll just say it made me cry on a train, which confused the person sitting next to me. Some books entertain you. This one does something rarer. It makes you feel less alone in the particular kind of solitude that comes from being a woman who refuses to be what she’s told to be.
Circe is a book about learning that you are not the monster they said you were, and also that you might be a monster anyway, and that’s okay. It’s about the power of making your own home, your own rules, your own self, even when the whole world is arrayed against you.
I’ve read it twice now, and I’ll read it again. It’s the kind of book you return to when you need to remember that solitude can be strength, that exile can be freedom, and that the name for what you are might not exist yet. But that doesn’t mean you’re not real.
“Beware the loneliness of the long-lived,” Circe thinks at one point. But she lives anyway, fully, fiercely, and she shows us how. That’s not nothing. That’s everything.
