The most famous part of Ariadne's story, helping Theseus escape the labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur, is only the beginning of this sweeping mythological novel. Saint cleverly combines sources, many with conflicting events and time lines, into the compelling story of a young woman who falls in love, experiences betrayal, and carves a life for herself outside the traditional narratives of gods and heroes. In doing so, the author underscores the cost of these narratives, which relegate women's complex and valuable lives to background incidents in heroes' stories, including horrifying incidents of sexual violence. Saint's writing is slow, atmospheric, and character-driven, purposefully setting aside the action-packed male hero narratives of Greek mythology to work in an alternate mode. While some readers may be put off by the book's slower pace and Ariadne's fulfillment through motherhood and domesticity, others will revel in the complex psychology of the characters. Perhaps most telling is the focus on Ariadne's younger sister, Phaedra, who "wins" the perfect marriage to a hero, becomes queen of Athens, and still finds herself trapped in an endless cycle of pregnancy and depression despite her intelligence and talent for politics. VERDICT This will appeal to older teens interested retellings that give voice to women's stories; offer it alongside books by Madeline Miller, Adèle Geras, Elana K. Arnold, and Jane Yolen.--Molly Saunders, Manatee County P.L., Bradenton, FL

Like Madeline Miller's Circe, Saint's debut novel offers a feminist retelling of a classic Greek myth, this one centering on the princess who helped Theseus slay the Minotaur. Here, Ariadne sees Theseus as a means of escaping her home, but she doesn't want to leave little sister Phaedra behind.

A debut novelist retells timeless tales from a feminine perspective. Classical mythology endures--at least in part--because of its malleability. Ancient Near Eastern cultures borrowed one another's deities and transformed them to meet their own needs. Poets, playwrights, and painters have been creating their own iterations of the Olympian gods for thousands of years. One of the difficulties of working with familiar figures and well-known tropes is making them fresh. Writers crafting long-form narratives face the additional challenge of putting flesh on archetypes. In choosing to give a voice to a woman plagued by awful men--her father, King Minos; her first love, the hero Theseus; Dionysus, the god of wine--Saint succeeds in presenting a distinctive version of Ariadne. The author doesn't quite deliver on making her protagonist--or anyone else in this novel--real. One issue is Saint's prose style. She uses formal, stilted language that is, perhaps, supposed to create a sense of antiquity but instead just feels unnatural. There is more telling than showing, and characters launch into soliloquies that might make sense in a Greek tragedy but are out of place here. On the whole, Saint is writing in a mode that is neither realist nor fantasy but an awkward place in between. For example, as she offers a detailed depiction of the infancy and development of the Minotaur--Ariadne's half brother--the monster ceases to be horrifying and instead becomes slightly ridiculous. The reader has leisure to ask such questions as why, since cows are herbivores, a creature with the head of a bull would enjoy a diet of human flesh. Worse, though, is that Saint manages to make Dionysus--a god who inspired bloodthirsty frenzies in his drunken followers--boring. Ariadne becomes his bride soon after she's dumped by Theseus. After a few years, Ariadne and Dionysus are staying together for the kids and hoping that a couples vacation to Athens will spice things up. Ambitious but uninspiring. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Saint's enchanting debut retells the myth of the minotaur through the eyes of Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete. Ariadne's life has always been touched by the gods, as her mother, Pasiphae, is the daughter of Helios, god of the sun. She has also witnessed their wrath, unfairly brought down upon Pasiphae by Poseidon, the sea god, because of Minos's transgressions against him. Her punishment, to fall into obsessive love with a bull, resulted in the Minotaur, Ariadne's half-human, half-bull brother. When Theseus, prince of Athens, is sent as part of that city's annual sacrifice to the Minotaur, a smitten Ariadne helps him defeat the monster and they flee Crete together. Ariadne hoped they would bring her sister, Phaedra, with them, but fickle Theseus breaks his promise, leaving Phaedra behind and abandoning Ariadne on the island of Naxos. The island is the home of Dionysus, god of wine and pleasure, and he takes Ariadne as his wife. Phaedra, meanwhile, is reluctantly married off to Theseus in a political maneuver of her father's. As the women navigate their changing positions of power, they court disaster at the hands of both gods and men. Saint expertly highlights how often the women of this world pay the price for the actions of the men around them. Lovers of mythology should snap this up. (May)

Ariadne and Phaedra are the daughters of Minos, the ruthless King of Crete, where each year hostages from Athens are fed to a labyrinth that holds the hungry, monstrous Minotaur. But when Theseus, the Prince of Athens, enters the maze himself, Ariadne is determined to help him escape and put an end to her father's cruelty. It is what comes after the Minotaur's defeat that will be uncertain: Ariadne will come to realize that women have no true place of agency in the games played between gods and heroes. Saint can be heavy-handed with foreshadowing and narrative exposition, and the sisters' motivations could have been better fleshed-out in the first part of the novel. But as the story continues, the two women become more complex--and bold. They grow stubborn and dare to grasp at happiness and even independence in a patriarchal world where anything might draw the ire of the gods or goddesses above them. Fans of Madeline Miller's Circe (2018) will enjoy this faithful retelling that centers on the often-forgotten women of Greek myth.