Book Review: "The Shadow of Perseus" by Claire Heywood

 

3.5/5 stars

*Spoiler alert!*

So many conflicted feelings about The Shadow of Perseus. However, to those arguing that there’s been too many feminist retellings of Greek mythology, I would disagree. It’s better than the inundation of male-centered stories, whether they are mythological or not. That is not my quibble with The Shadow of Perseus. I love all the authors centering women’s stories, stories often shoved to the side or just omitted because they are not considered important or heroic enough. My quibble is the women-as-construction crew narrative that seemed to creep in throughout The Shadow of Perseus, that the major women figures in a man’s life are responsible for “fixing” him.

“Never is more than we can know. Who can say what the Fates will spin for us? So little of my life has happened as I thought it would.”

 

That did take my four-star review and drop it down to 3.5, although credit to the author for otherwise giving the women characters associated with the Perseus myth a greater degree of agency than traditional Greek mythology would give them. Despite all this, I really enjoyed Claire Heywood giving us the perspectives of Danae, Perseus’s mother; Medusa, the infamous monster with snakes for hair; and Andromeda, Perseus’s wife from a tribe of North African nomads.

I also really enjoyed the magical realism employed in place of the divine. Instead of Perseus being a son of Zeus, as the story normally goes, he’s just the child of two mortals, Danae and Myron. Medusa merely wears a crown of snakes and is leader among the Gorgons, a reclusive tribe of women from Greece to Africa. Andromeda is not rescued from a sea monster; she’s merely performing a sacrifice to the gods to save her tribe from catastrophic windstorms.

It’s a great commentary on how biased and skewed mythological retellings can be, along the lines of the winners writing history. Perseus inventing and spreading word of his heroic exploits involving the Gorgons and Andromeda merely is one example of many historical examples. Therefore, to those doing retellings of popular myths: go for it! Myths reflect the dominant sociocultural situation at the time of their writing (or telling, as myths are often oral traditions). So why not update the stories for our times, as past generations have?

The author even acknowledges in her postscript that that was her intention. She was using the skeleton of the myth for structure and built off it. That’s what humans do! We are storytellers by nature and by necessity.

So, kudos to Claire Heywood for giving women typically coded as villainous in Greek mythology, or those who had little voice or agency. Fans of mythological retellings, I think you’ll mostly enjoy The Shadow of Perseus.

Happy reading!

--BookOwl