Charlotte Kersten

Year published: 2023

Category: Retelling (Medusa)

Representation: F/f, side character

Summary:  Even before they were transformed into Gorgons, Medusa and her sisters, Stheno and Euryale, were unique among immortals. Curious about mortals and their lives, Medusa and her sisters entered the human world in search of a place to belong, yet quickly found themselves at the perilous center of a dangerous Olympian rivalry and learned—too late—that a god’s love is a violent one.

Forgotten by history and diminished by poets, the other two Gorgons have never been more than horrifying hags, damned and doomed. But they were sisters first, and their journey from sea-born origins to the outskirts of the Parthenon is a journey that rests, hidden, underneath their scales.

Monsters, but not monstrous, Stheno and Euryale will step into the light for the first time to tell the story of how all three sisters lived and were changed by each other, as they struggle against the inherent conflict between sisterhood and individuality, myth and truth, vengeance and peace.

My Thoughts: Obligatory note: I received an ARC from NetGalley.

There has been a true deluge of feminist Greek myth retellings getting published since Circe’s success, and I haven’t really dipped my toes in until now. Medusa’s Sisters met the general expectations that I’ve developed for this type of book based on reviews by trusted friends – awkward attempts at lyrical prose, a few interesting subversions of classical mythology, and a somewhat confused attempt at being feminist by showing lots of awful men and violence against women.

One of the most glaring elements that didn’t work for me was the writing. Especially in the first half, I could almost feel Bear flipping through her thesaurus on the regular. This book’s attempt at elegant prose is largely characterized by using fancy/esoteric words with a result that feels pretty stilted and awkward instead of sophisticated. Probably the worst example I found was this:

“I sheltered her too much,” she told Euryale, for despite their tenuous start, Desma had come to appreciate Euryale’s sagacity – especially compared to Medusa’s and Semele’s penchant for the quixotic.

Even if you look past the anachronistic use of “quixotic,” it’s just… not good. To be fair, this tendency gets notably better in the second half, either because the prose actually changes or because I got more used to it, I’m not sure.

Bear made an interesting choice in having her protagonists Euryale and Stheno be deeply flawed characters. Euryale spends much of the book being callous and self-centered, while Stheno is a hardcore placater who has no real identity out of caring for her sisters. Both of them grow throughout the book – not necessarily in the neat, expected way of becoming selfless and independent, respectively, but in ways that I did find interesting nonetheless. My biggest disappointment with characterization is that Medusa herself is so flat and boring – she is just perfectly sweet and beautiful and smart and curious and everyone except mean, mean Euryale loves her until she goes through horrible things and dies tragically. I can understand giving more interiority to the eponymous sisters, but it’s really glaring to me how bad Medusa’s writing feels compared to theirs, and I think the big theme of Sisterhood could have been a lot more interesting if Medusa was more interesting, too.

Like I said, there is definitely an attempt at feminism present via showing copious violence against women and endlessly brutal and selfish men, but I don’t feel that the book has anything particularly interesting, distinct, or novel to say about any of this. Otherwise, I do like that Bear clearly thought about how women are conditioned to turn against each other and hurt each other for many reasons in a patriarchal world – this is something that was definitely lacking in Circe, as were any meaningful, complex female relationships like the ones sometimes present here.

My reading experience with this book is kind of similar to my experience with The Witch’s Heart in that I didn’t really enjoy it and noticed a lot of flaws throughout, but I still ended up feeling moved by the ending. There is something that just GETS TO ME about the inevitable passage of time for lonely immortals – their loves and losses fading as life moves on and on past their horrors and tragedies to continue in some new way. Idk, I just LIKE it!