Atalanta: The dazzling story of the only female Argonaut

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She greeted the hounds, then inclined her head for me to follow her into the forest depths, indicating for me to walk as soundlessly as she did, and to pause and look around with quick, darting movements at frequent intervals. Ariadne was her first novel, Elektra her second, and Atalanta is her latest mesmerising mythological retelling. I felt that it was a bit slow to get started – the section set in the woods with the nymphs seemed to last forever – but once Atalanta joined the Argonauts on their quest it all became much more compelling. Michaelides takes a literary turn in his latest novel, employing an unreliable narrator, the structure of classical drama, and a self-conscious eye to dismantling the locked-room mystery.

But then her experiences of pregnancy do focus in on the way that the biological reality of women is very different. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Though action-packed and dramatic, the sheer number of these episodes becomes tedious; the author may hew too closely and too inclusively to the original epic. After thirteen years as a high school English teacher, she wrote Ariadne which tells the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur from the perspective of Ariadne - the woman who made it happen.As she reaches adulthood, it is clear that Atalanta possesses special skills in hunting, shooting and running. Her arrow pierced its throat in an instant, before its liquid brown eyes could register the danger it had run into, and it slumped down, a trickle of red sliding down below the slender wooden shaft of her weapon. In between, she spent thirteen years as an English teacher, sharing a love of literature and creative writing with her students. If anybody deserves their own novel, Atalanta does – and Saint’s treatment of her does not disappoint.

Rating 9: Powerful and sure-handed, Jennifer Saint brings to life a new hero, a woman who knows her value and will not let any man shunt her to the side. Does this sense of magic come from her connection with Artemis, or is there something else that gives her power? All of this to say, I was incredibly excited to see that Jennifer Saint was giving this powerful woman a story all of her own!Despite her closeness to Artemis, she’s not foolish enough to rely upon the goddess as a protector: she has seen first-hand that the gods can be cold and capricious, and all she wants from Artemis is the chance to prove herself. So constructing her character meant inventing a backstory and using the figure we meet on stage to work backwards and understand how she became so warped and twisted in her thinking in the first place. I also really liked the way the end of the story was dealt with, providing a unique, and, again, true-feeling conclusion to this heroic woman’s tale.

She chose a life in the forest instead, preferring to bathe in the pools by silver moonlight and run through the trees by day, swift and graceful, a quiver of arrows slung across her body and her bow always ready. She has an incredibly fascinating backstory and I thoroughly enjoyed each time she gave one of the men a run for their money. Greek tragedy, of course, is pretty much non-stop gloom, punctuated by tension, betrayal, suicide, incest and/or maiming, before a bit more gloom to round things off; and female characters are often on the receiving end of the worst treatment tragedy has to offer. Jason’s tragic quest for the Golden Fleece has been re-imagined many times since Irish poet Padraic Colum won the Newbery Medal in 1922 for The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles and Robert Graves penned The Golden Fleece (1944). it rules them out as reading material for contemporary devout polytheists and that’s unfortunate because it’s a hungry market.Rescued by bears and raised along with their cubs, Atalanta grows up under the watchful eye of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, who later takes her to live amongst the nymphs in the forest. The scent from the jasmine…spilled out on the breeze, the delicate star-shaped flowers opening to the darkness. Atalanta's father was so disappointed when she was born and wasn't a boy that he left her on the side of a mountain to die.

Thanks to a lifelong fascination with Ancient Greek mythology, Jennifer Saint read Classical Studies at King’s College, London. That’s why I was delighted when Jennifer Saint chose Atalanta as the subject for her next myth novel, following Ariadne and Elektra. Published in 2023, Atalanta by Jennifer Saint follows Princess Atalanta who, born a daughter rather than the son her parents hoped for, is left on a mountainside to die. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. In her newest release, we follow Atalanta – raised in the forest by a bear, Atalanta is a favourite of the goddess Artemis.While the story sags here and there, the ending is so beautiful it makes every moment leading up to it worth the wait.