I’ll start off by saying that I did, in fact, really enjoy this book. I’m saying that up front because I’m going to delve into a few fundamental things that didn’t work for me so here’s a disclaimer – I enjoyed this book!

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Ariadne is, as you might expect, about the life of Ariadne of ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’. The book follows her whole life, so while the first part was a bit dry (going over the events of ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’) the story really got going once she left Crete with Theseus and we began to venture into stories not as well-known. One of the main characters for the latter half of the book is Dionysus, god of wine, and I really liked the approach Jennifer Saint took to his character. Rather than the party-loving, pompous idiot you usually get in mythological retellings, he was (mostly) kind, loving and all too aware of the consequences of gods meddling in human affairs.

The recurring theme of the book was how, in the dealings of gods and men, it is women who suffer the consequences. It was an interesting theme, and I was excited when it was first brought up, but it didn’t really go anywhere.

Where the book fell down for me was actually in the mythology itself. Ariadne has very little agency in her story, becoming – as Saint rightly observed – a pawn in the games between gods and men. Any significant character development would alter the outcome of the stories this book is based on, and so it had to either be undone or not happen at all in the first place.

The obvious example is Ariadne herself. She didn’t really… do anything? I can count on one hand the amount of times she made her own decision about what to do next, and in some of those cases her actions had no consequences or didn’t even shape her opinions about what she had witnessed or learned. Then there’s Dionysus; as I mentioned I really liked the direction Saint took him in, but it wasn’t sustainable because he was always going to torture hundreds of women and incite battle with Perseus. There wasn’t the wiggle room in the original myth for any of the character development Saint clearly wanted. And yet Ariadne spent over a decade on an island overwhelmingly populated by women, and we only briefly learnt one of their names? Those relationships and dynamics, though not relevant to the original myth, would have been a welcome addition.

I am intrigued to see what Jennifer Saint writes next. The actual reading experience was very enjoyable, and the bones were there for a fantastic book. Unfortunately, and ironically, the original myth got in the way.