Ariadne Gave the Thread. Everyone Else Got the Glory

A Princess, a Monster, and a Piece of String

You know the bones of this one even if you’ve never touched a mythology book in your life. Ariadne is the daughter of King Minos of Crete, sister to the Minotaur (her actual half brother, born of her mother and a bull, which is its own horror show that Saint doesn’t shy away from), and the woman who hands Theseus a ball of thread so he can find his way back out of the labyrinth after he kills said half brother. In the myths we grew up with, that’s basically her entire function. She’s a plot device with a nice name. Saint’s whole project here is to ask what it actually felt like to be the girl standing at the mouth of the maze, in love with a man she’s just met, betraying her father and enabling the murder of her brother, on the theory that this stranger will marry her and take her away from an island that has never been kind to her.

I won’t spoil what happens after Naxos (the internet has already spoiled it for you if you’ve spent any time near BookTok, but I’ll leave it be), except to say that the novel splits its attention between Ariadne and her sister Phaedra, and that split is both the book’s smartest structural choice and the thing that ends up diluting it. You can grab a copy here if you want to see for yourself: Ariadne by Jennifer Saint.

Where It Sings, Where It Sags

Here’s the thing. The first act, the Crete section, is genuinely great. Saint writes the labyrinth and the bull-god birth and Ariadne’s whole childhood under the weight of her father’s cruelty with real control. There’s a scene early on where Ariadne watches the tribute ships arrive from Athens, the fourteen young people who’ll be fed to her brother, and she has to reconcile loving a monster who is also her family with the horror of what he does to them. Saint doesn’t let her off the hook for this. Ariadne knows what she’s part of. That moral discomfort, the guilt that never fully resolves, is the best writing in the book.

Then Naxos happens (you know, THE moment, the one every retelling of this myth has to deal with), and something shifts. I won’t pretend I didn’t feel my stomach drop right along with hers. But once Ariadne washes up on Naxos and the god Dionysus enters the picture, the book’s energy changes completely, and not for the better. The back half becomes a slower, more meandering domestic drama, jumping between Ariadne raising a family on Naxos and Phaedra’s marriage to Theseus back in Athens, and it starts to feel like two different novellas stitched together with matching prose style but different pulses. Phaedra’s chapters have their own bleak momentum (her arc gets genuinely dark, and there’s a version of this book where her story is the main event), but the alternating structure means neither woman gets to build real narrative pressure. I found myself skimming in the middle third, which I never do, and I felt a little guilty about it, like I was failing the book somehow.

Real criticism, since I promised myself I’d give one: the prose, which is lovely in short bursts, gets repetitive at novel length. Saint leans hard on a certain register, lots of women “trapped” and “voiceless” and gods being cruel in exactly the ways you expect gods to be cruel, and by page 250 I could feel the thesis statement (women suffer, gods don’t care, the myths never asked what SHE wanted) being restated rather than complicated. Compare this to Madeline Miller’s Circe, which this book will always be compared to whether that’s fair or not, and Circe earns its emotional beats through centuries of accumulated interiority. Ariadne tries to do something similar in a fraction of the space and sometimes tells you the feeling instead of building it.

Tangent, but I think this matters. Part of why this book blew up when it did is that it arrived at the exact moment readers were starving for exactly this kind of story; Circe had already proven there was an audience, and Ariadne rode that wave hard, for better and worse. I don’t think that’s a knock on Saint. I think it means I read this book already primed to love it, and I have to ask myself honestly whether I’d rate it as high if it had come out with no context, no hype, no “if you loved Circe” sticker on the cover. I’m not totally sure I would.

Every myth about a woman handing a man the way out of the dark eventually has to ask why nobody wrote down her way back in.

About Jennifer Saint

Jennifer Saint spent years teaching English and Classics to teenagers in the UK before she sat down and decided the girls at the edges of Greek myth deserved their own books, and thank god somebody with an actual classics background did it instead of leaving it to vibes. Ariadne was her debut novel, which is a wild thing to sit with once you know it, because it reads like someone who’d been carrying this story around for a decade. She followed it with Elektra and Atalanta, both mining the same vein of women who got footnoted in the original texts, and she’s become one of the steadiest hands in a genre that’s now extremely crowded with imitators who don’t have her classroom-level grip on the source material.

If This Wrecked You (or Frustrated You), Read These Next

Circe by Madeline Miller, because it’s the book that opened this door and it’s simply better paced, with a lonelier, more devastating back half. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, if you want the Trojan War told with more anger and less romance. Elektra, Saint’s own follow-up, if you want to see her tighten up the structural issues from this book (she mostly does). And Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes if you want Medusa’s side of things told with sharper, funnier prose.

For your book club

1. Ariadne helps Theseus knowing what it will cost her family. Do you think she made the right choice, or was she just trading one kind of captivity for another?
2. The novel splits time between Ariadne and Phaedra. Did that structure work for you, or did you find yourself wanting more of one sister’s story?
3. How does Saint handle the Minotaur? Does giving him even a sliver of humanity change how you feel about the myth you grew up with?
4. Dionysus is a god who seems, at first, kinder than the others. Did your opinion of him shift by the end, and where exactly did it turn?
5. If you’ve read Circe, how do the two books compare in how they handle a woman’s relationship to powerful, careless men? Which one earned its ending for you?