Ariadne Unraveled is a retelling of the lives of Ariadne, the woman who gave Theseus a ball of yarn to guide him through the Minotaur’s lair, and Dionysus, a relatively new god of fertility and wine, so new he doesn’t have a seat on Mount Olympus. Typically I enjoy a good myth retelling from nearly any culture, but I found Ariadne Unraveled rather flat.
This is essentially a love-at-first sight romance with an abundance of soft porn sex scenes throughout. A lack of emotional depth marked their sexual encounters, so I found it difficult to feel their love for each other. Dionysus has an innate ability to charm people and arouse their lust. He freely has sex with them, male or female, but the question remains is this ability the Greek myth equivalent of a “date rape” drug? Can Ariadne (or any other of Dionysus’s many lovers) give actual consent under those circumstances?
Additionally Ariadne has a “friendship” with her lover, the slave Thalia, but it doesn’t appear to be a bona fide friendship as Thalia must always please Ariadne and rarely receives substantive appreciation.
Overall, I found the characters somewhat unappealing and one-dimensional with little character arc for Ariadne. Dionysus at least struggles to become the kind of god he wants to be and to earn his own seat on Mount Olympus. Even Thalia has more of a character arc than Ariadne, as the slave becomes a shape-shifting leopard capable of defending Ariadne and Dionysus. Though billed as a “feminist” retelling, I didn’t find it particularly feminist as Ariadne seemed to entirely lack her own agency. Additionally, the prose was a bit sophomoric and lacked the myth-evoking grace and grandeur of Madeline Miller’s books, Circe and The Song of Achilles or Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, Stone Blind, or Divine Might (nonfiction).
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Ariadne Unraveled (Hypatia Books, July 7, 2021) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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You can read my reviews of Natalie Haynes’s books here:
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You can read my reviews of Madeline Miller’s books here:
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