This is an interesting slant on the story of Danae, Perseus, Medusa and Andromeda because it forgoes gods and magic altogether and instead takes a realistic, “historical” approach to the tale. As always in Greek legend and myth, the women face terrible tribulations, and because there are no supernatural elements here, the horror of their circumstances feels even more acute. When Medusa isn’t a monster but simply a mortal woman, her fate is all the more harrowing. (That said, Medusa is technically a “monster” in Natalie Haynes’ outstanding Stone Blind, but her trajectory is still utterly heartbreaking in that book, even with snakes for hair).

I appreciated this attempt at a new approach to these legends, however (SPOILERS AHEAD):

Perseus is (almost inexplicably) horrendous and gets off FAR too easily. I understand that if you’re going to stay true to the general outlines of the original Greek tale, then Perseus needs to be alive at the end so he can go on and found cities and whatnot, but he is so vile and unsympathetic that I was shocked when the book ended with Danae refusing to see her son for who he is and instead basically telling the traumatized Andromeda “I’m sure he’s gotten it out of his system, and seeing as we’re all here together now, we’ll just have to make the best of it.” I also didn’t entirely buy Perseus’ trajectory from sweet boy to frenzied murderer and rapist, and I wasn’t comfortable with the implication that Danae was somehow to blame because she was overprotective of him as a child, leading him to grow up with the feeling that he constantly had to prove himself as “a man.” Heywood has taken liberties with the natures and trajectories of other characters in the book (for example, Polydectes is a good, honorable man in this retelling, but in the original myth it’s him who demands that Perseus cut off Medusa’s head), so I’m not sure why Perseus, Danae and Andromeda have been portrayed the way they are here. Danae in particular seems to be just an apologist for her monster of a son - which I suppose is an accurate depiction of how some women will justify and excuse the worst behavior of the men around them, but I don’t see what place that attitude has in a woman-centered and ostensibly feminist retelling of this tale. In a really radical and interesting retelling, Danae and Andromeda would have done away with Perseus at the end - and good riddance to him.

Further reading…