How retellings should be done 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️ Medea is mostly true to the original myth, and doesn’t shy away from the brutal, horrible things Medea does. There is no whitewashing here, no rounding out her edges to make her more likeable. Instead, we see what happens when a women is pushed to the brink - manipulated, used, and abused by the men in her life. This is a timeless story of emotional abuse and control, treated beautifully and with unflinching honesty.

Highly recommend the audiobook - listening to Lena tell her own story is like sitting down with your long lost witty, brilliant friend and catching up on the last 15 years of life. Lena is infuriating, chaotic, mercurial, and above all, vulnerable.

Definitely suffered from a case of “this wasn’t for me” and “f*ck I should have read the short story prequels”

While the premise was interesting and very well researched, I felt lost most of the time and didn’t care enough to keep rereading and re-referencing who’s who. After about 150 pages of said rereading I decided to just roll with it, hoping I would figure it out, but never fully did.

The pacing was way off; long stretches of no action followed by info dumps and back to back massive plot points. This also suffered from my most hated fantasy downfall: the lore and magic isn’t explained until it’s relevant, and becomes deus ex machina.

Example:

“Why was the djinn able to do that thing they shouldn’t be able to do?” “Oh because actually due to the law of so and so there’s actually a technicality that lets this happen”

TLDR: I see why this is loved, this is a quality book, but you DEFINITELY need to read the short stories to appreciate it