Stone Blind: Medusa’s Story, Natalie Haynes, Pan Macmillan, ISBN: 9781529061499
I REALLY wanted to love this book, but it had one glaring and major problem: It was not really telling Medusa’s story.
While Greek mythology is filled to the brim with tragic characters, none has captured the imagination quite like the gorgon sister who is assaulted and stripped of her innocence by the sea god, Poseidon, and then further blamed and cursed by the goddess, Athena.
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For me, this was a ‘retelling of the story of Medusa’ and not ‘Medusa’s story’.
I felt as if Medusa only played a minor role in her own story. Between the gods’ revenge schemes, origin arcs and irrelevant side plots, we are given only glimpses of Medusa’s experiences and perspective.
I was hoping to be entrenched in the feelings, thoughts and emotions of Medusa before, during and after she condemned herself to an undeserved life of solitude.
She felt one-dimensional, and at no point did we see any character development in, who is supposed to be, the story’s protagonist.
The book has been hailed as a feminist retelling of Medusa’s myth, however, for me, she remained a victim without any agency – a mere pawn of the selfish, cruel and egotistical gods.
Even her tragic demise felt anticlimactic and was told from an outside perspective.
Natalie Haynes does write beautifully, and she did a wonderful job of capturing the magic of the Greek myth.
However, the book, unfortunately, did not deliver on its promises. Mariclair Smit 3/5 stars
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