Book Review: "Medusa's Sisters"

Lauren J.A. Bear's novel gives Medusas's sisters a much-needed opportunity to share their own stories.

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Warning: Major spoilers for the novel follow!

As you might have guessed by now, if there’s a classic myth retelling out there, I’m going to read it. Yes, they might vary widely in terms of quality, but even the most lackluster of them are doing an important service by elevating and emphasizing the voices and experiences of women. One of the more extraordinary recent retellings is Medusa’s Sisters, by Lauren J.A. Bear. As you might gather from its title, it focuses on the two Gorgons who were the siblings of one of mythology’s most maligned (and misunderstood characters), and it is a richly-told and emotionally resonant tale of three sisters bound together by tragedy and by love.

If you’re even passingly familiar with ancient Greek myth, you no doubt have an image of Medusa: the monstrous Gorgon with the snakes for hair who could turn anyone to stone just by looking at them. While she does eventually become this creature in this book, she begins the story as the only one of the three Gorgons to be mortal. Stheno and Euryale, on the other hand, are blessed (or cursed, depending on your perspective) with eternal life, and this shapes their destiny and the way they interact with their third sibling.

For much of the first half of the novel Euryale, Stheno, and Medusa are largely witnesses to the great doings of others. Among other things, they befriend the doomed Semele, whose affair with the god Zeus ends tragically when she is tricked by Hera into forcing the powerful god to show her his true form. This is just one reminder to Stheno and Euryale of how frail human life is, particularly when compared to the caprice and cruelty of the Olympian gods, who all too frequently view mortals as their playthings and their pawns in their battles and contests with one another. It’s a rather dark message, but one that is surprisingly resonant. 

There is, indeed, a potent sense of sadness throughout Medusa’s Sisters. Of the three, Stheno is the one who worries the most, and she is constantly worried that something will happen to her mortal sibling. As a human, Medusa is in love with the world around her, always trying to find out something new about creation. While for a time this is a positive thing, it soon takes a much more sinister turn once she finds herself drawn into the worship of Athena, and only belatedly do her sisters realize that she has been carrying on a very physical affair with this virgin goddess, with predictably disastrous results. 

Once Poseidon rapes Medusa in Athena’s temple, the stage is set for the sisters’ disfigurement and subsequent exile. Athena, like so many other deities in ancient mythology, doesn’t care about how much she hurts these three women. All that matters to her is that they can’t tell the world the dreadful secret of her affair with Medusa. And so the Gorgons become the monsters of legend, taking up their residence on a lonely isle far from everyone they’ve ever known and loved. Bear does an excellent job of conveying to us how damaging this is for the three of them, particularly since Euryale, unbeknownst to her sisters, was the one who blurted the truth about Medusa’s dalliance with Athena in the first place. 

Though most of the novel is told from the point of view of Euryale and Stheno (in third person and first person, respectively), it does occasionally zoom out to give us other perspectives, notably that of the boy Perseus, whose own fate will intersect with intersect with that of the Gorgons in the most tragic way imaginable. His decapitation of Medusa is related in an almost terse fashion, but this doesn’t mitigate its impact on her remaining sisters, who spend the latter half of the novel grappling with their own feelings of grief and powerlessness in the hands of a world which seems determined to beat them down.

Even in their exile and in the ashes of their life with Medusa, Euryale and Stheno still find a way to persevere, and the former even goes so far as to consummate an affair with Poseidon. This leads to the birth of Orion, who goes on to lead his own eventful (and tragic) life. For both sisters this human life gives them a purpose, something to focus on now that their sister has perished and her own progeny have been banished from their island. Orion seems to bring out the best in both of them, and it provides them a means of finding their way back to one another. 

Like Madeline Miller, Bear has a keen sense of how to use prose to convey the beauty, the terror, and the strangeness of antiquity, particularly the moment in the ancient world when gods and monsters were said to stride the world among mortals. It probably comes as no surprise that I love books that make me feel the ache of sadness and mourning and Medusa’s Sisters certainly fits the bill in that regard. This isn’t to say that it’s all tragic and despairing, of course, because it isn’t. Stheno, for example, learns about the gorgeous and transformative power of music, while Euryale gets to observe human sexuality in all of its beauty and cruelty. 

All in all, I found Medusa’s Sisters to be a magnificent and moving mythological retelling. Much like Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind (which released a year ago), it shows that there is still much to know about the terrifying women with snakes for hair. Rather than letting those who came after them tell their story, these women emerge from the shadows and seize control of the narrative. They aren’t perfect–far from it–but this is precisely what makes them so compelling to read. They exist in a liminal space between the gods and the humans and, as such, they remind us of the power and the peril to be found for those who refuse to be bound or continued by the categories that humans have devised.