Published By: Zaffre
Pages: 400
Released On: 20/11/2025
Meddy has spent her whole life as a footnote in someone else’s story. Out of place next to her beautiful, immortal sisters and her parents-both gods, albeit minor ones-she dreams of leaving her family’s island for a life of adventure. So when she catches the eye of the goddess Athena, who invites her to train as an esteemed priestess in her temple, Meddy leaps at the chance to see the world beyond her home.
In Athens’ colourful market streets and the clandestine chambers of the temple, Meddy flourishes in her role as Athena’s favoured acolyte, getting her first tastes of purpose and power. But when she is noticed by another Olympian, Poseidon, a drunken night between girl and god ends in violence, and the course of Meddy’s promising future is suddenly and irrevocably altered.
Her locs transformed into snakes as punishment for a crime she did not commit, Medusa must embrace a new identity-not as a victim, but as a vigilante-and with it, the chance to write her own story as mortal, martyr, and myth.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Zaffre for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
There are some difficult topics in this book that I don’t want to name because that would really spoil the reading of it, but I assume the finished copy may have warnings. But there are definitely some extreme power struggles in this book, along with all the…unsavoury aspects that can come with that.
I blow hot and cold with mythological retellings but I do love the Medusa ones I have red, and this sounded a bit different. It’s about Medusa before she was Medusa and that gave it an interesting angle.
I had been in a bit of a reading slump with some really disappointing reads before this, so there was a lot riding on it, but it was really fantastic. It draws you in right from the off, it’s so enticing.
This is Medusa’s origin story. We don’t get Medusa until quite near the end, which I initially wondered would be too late, because if you read a book about Medusa then you expect it to be about Medusa. But I really enjoyed learning about her backstory and the woman behind the myth. She’s been made very real, very human, which gives us this different viewpoint on the character we’ve learnt to know as a monster. But we do also get elements we recognise from this myth. Having said that, I’d have liked the Medusa bits to be a bit longer, so we could get a better comparison between the two “characters”, but it was still very, very good.
There was so much firepower in this, such passion. It’s so intense but never feels like too much. You get the quieter human moments settling in nicely behind the fear and power that the Gods have over everyone.
Rarely do I say this about a book (because 400 pages is smack bang in the middle of my ideal page length), but I was it was longer. It’s great as it is, I loved everything about it, but because it was so good, I wanted more of it. It’s so rich and luxurious that I didn’t want to part from it. I read it in less than a day.
It is my first of Ayana’s books, but going on how much I enjoyed this, I’ll definitely be seeking out more.
There are so many mythological retellings nowadays and I have read a lot, and they can get a bit samey and lose their impact, but this was so fresh and new, yet it keeps the essence that makes the genre so successful.
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