Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I am reviewing Ariadne by Jennifer Saint. This is the author’s debut novel. Visit her website here.
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint is a retelling of the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, from the point of view of the woman who helped Theseus kill the monster, Ariadne of Crete, daughter of Minos and the King of Crete. Or so that is what Goodreads says. Frankly, the synopsis of this book is a little misleading because this is not what the book is about. Yes, Ariadne helps Theseus kill the Minotaur and this myth is part of the plot, but it is not what the book as a whole is about. And I realized that when I saw that the battle between the Minotaur and Theseus isn’t even shown in the book. The poor beast is killed ‘off-camera’, or more accurately, ‘off-page’. He was dead in less than a sentence, and I wasn’t even halfway through the book yet. O….K…..
“You do not even know what your own husband is.”
It is not the book’s fault that the synopsis for it doesn’t concur with what it is really about, but I would’ve thought that the author would’ve known her own book better to correct this mistake. But okay. By the time I finished reading this book, however, I was asking myself why is this book even called Ariadne? Not that Ariadne isn’t important, she is. But she isn’t the only main character. The other main character is her sister Phaedra. And that is what this book is about: Ariadne and her sister Phaedra, and how, in their relationship, each one is the complete opposite of the other. Ariadne is the sister living in a dream world, in a bubble; a fact that is shown in the book by her naiveté, in her believing Theseus that he will marry her after she helps him kill the Minotaur and gain renown only to be abandoned later in Naxos to die, and in her refusal to believe, later, when she is already wed to Dionysus, that Dionysus would ever require sacrifices, like the other gods, from his worshippers; something that Dionysus does in fact require but chooses to hide from Ariadne, and she prefers to believe in the lie than in the reality of the fact. Phaedra, on the other hand, is the sister that lives in the real world and is the one that suffers by that reality. She is the one that marries Theseus and is soon disenchanted from the fantasy of marriage and instead is utterly unhappy. She tries to find purpose by helping her people, but her unhappiness and sadness is accentuated by her severe postpartum depression later on; life has shown her no love or happiness. That is why, close to the end of the book, she fights like hell to find her own happiness thinking herself in love with Hippolytus.
“What I did not know was that I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: However blameless the life we lead, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.”
Both sisters’ lives end tragically. Phaedra’s by suicide, to escape the shame of wanting to elope with a man that was not her husband, and Ariadne’s by having opened her eyes too late to reality and having to pay the price for it, by being petrified to stone. Particularly, I thought that this book was brutal to women. And not just to Ariadne and Phaedra, but to their mother as well. Why is Pasiphae the one that pays for her husband’s slight to Poseidon? Technically, the god of the sea wanted to disgrace Minos by disgracing his wife but still. Women are usually the ones that suffer because of their husbands’ actions and poor Pasiphae is not the exception, no matter that she is the daughter of a god. Even semi-goddesses are their husbands’ possessions. Poor Pasiphae. And frankly I didn’t think that Minos suffered any more because of it. After all, his wife’s son became the Minotaur, and the creature gave him fame. And then, after his death, Minos is rewarded for having established law and order on earth and becomes one of the judges of the underworld. Being the son of Zeus has its perks, I guess. Though, I wouldn’t mind reading a novel about the three judges of the dead. But that’s besides the point.
I gave this book an I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating.
