Circe

Why it's worth it

Madeline Miller retells the life of a minor witch from the Odyssey as a first-person account of a woman learning what she's capable of. It's myth rather than strict history, and it's the softest landing here for anyone who finds war novels heavy going.

Circe is banished to an island and stays there for most of the book, so the famous names come to her — Daedalus, the Minotaur, Odysseus and his crew. That structure makes it feel like a series of visits rather than a plot you have to track, which is why it reads so easily even if your Greek mythology stopped at grade school.

The sentences are the reason to buy it. Miller writes with a clarity that never turns purple, and readers who come for the story stay to underline passages. If the plainness of Pachinko or the workmanlike prose of The Nightingale left you wanting, this is the corrective.

From our review of 8 historical fiction books, by Genevieve Dubois, Home & Living Expert

What we like

• +Circe is banished to an island and stays there for most of the book, so the famous names come to her — Daedalus, the Minotaur,…
• +The sentences are the reason to buy it
• +It's the best crossover book here for fantasy readers

What to know

• –The middle sags. Circe's isolation is thematically the point, but a stretch of the book is one visitor after another with little…
• –It's not really historical fiction