Medusa: The Girl Behind the Myth (Illustrated Gift Edition)

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I only knew Medusa from the painting by Caravaggio, his infamous, almost circular self-portrait as Medusa. It addresses the issues you would expect: the nature of beauty, love, attraction, victim blaming, being different, gender stereotyping and the trauma of sexual assault. View image in fullscreen Chris Ofili’s The Riddle of the Sphinx, from Charlotte Higgins’s Greek Myths: A New Retelling.

Jessie Burton: her book ‘is destined to become as much an artefact of our own age as it is an illumination of the ancient past’. With Jessie Burton's characteristic lyrical and beautiful writing matched by stunning illustrations, I loved this story of survival, healing and bravery of all kinds. I think this is another unfortunate case where perhaps the author had a word-count to hit, and just used repetitive speech to do so.Any photos or images used on this site that do not belong to the author are royalty free and licensed under creative commons, or cover images of books used to promote them.

In this Medusa retelling, Jessie Burton shows us that labels never give us the full story of a person. BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. This title is mentioned in the same breath as any antecedent in the recent retelling renaissance, most notably Circe. Stalked by Poseidon she is sexually abused by him in Athena’s temple but far from sympathy you would expect from Athena, instead the goddess turns her beautiful hair to a mass of venomous snakes with a promise “woe betide any man fool enough to look upon you now”.But one day a handsome man rowed up to her shores, making her question everything she thought she wanted. She first fell under the spell of the myths when an older brother bought her a copy of Kenneth McLeish’s Children of the Gods. In Stone Blind, classicist and comedian Natalie Haynes turns our understanding of this legendary myth on its head, bringing empathy and nuance to one of the earliest stories in which a woman--injured by a powerful man--is blamed, punished, and monstered for the assault.

the conclusion is so forceful in its want to be a ‘feminist’ book too, as it ends with a warning about women who gain reputations like medusa. Told through an assortment of narrators such as humans, gods and even inanimate objects, Haynes deftly reconfigures a variety of Greek myths into one long and multi-faceted story with Medusa acting like a center of gravity pulling the disparate tales into a contextual orbit. this book was literally two characters reading the wikipedia articles of their respective greek myths with the other occasionally going “oh no!However, Burton’s take is unique in that it explores Medusa as a teen girl who must reinvent herself to survive.