As All Hallows Eve looms, it seemed like a perfect moment for a new witchy tale from Greek mythology.
And who better to bring to life than Medea, the spell-conjuring sorceress who helped Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, pursue the Golden Fleece.
In Rosie Hewlett’s new novel, “The Witch of Colchis,” we meet Medea before Jason’s betrayal and before her volcanic revenge, when she is a young princess, manipulated by her father who seeks to use her magic for his own advantage and shunned by her people for her knowledge of sorcery.
She confides in the first sentence of the novel, “When I was a child, I turned my brother into a pig.”
Her father ordered her to undo the spell and when Medea said she couldn’t, he beat her.
“Unlike my mother,” she tells us, “I never cried when my father hurt me.”
Apprenticed to her Aunt Circe, also the heroine of a wonderful novel by Madeline Miller, Medea begins to understand how to manage her magic. Until the world’s pain becomes too much.
— Kerri Miller
