Point of View

Circe is narrated from the first person past tense across its 27 chapters, each of which relays one aspect of the eponymous character's history. Beginning with her childhood, in her father, Helios', halls, and moving, gradually, to the various events and adventures that would take up her time while exiled on Aiaia, these chapters follow Circe as she experiments with pharmaka, falls in love, challenges fate, and contemplates the nature of mortality. By inviting readers into the mind of this character who exists only on the peripheries of classic literature, Miller imbues the witch from the Odyssey with a sense of humanity, explaining and expanding upon a number of the character traits Odysseus assigns her in his epic.

For example, when Circe appears in books 10 and 11 of the Odyssey, she is described as ruthless — she transforms wary sailors into pigs for no reason but pleasure — and...