With Stone Blind, Natalie Haynes (A Thousand Ships; Pandora's Jar) brings her authoritative expertise in Greek myths to bear on Medusa, whose story is fresh and surprising in this telling.
Medusa is delivered as an infant mortal to the two elder Gorgons who will be her sisters--in this version, they are monsters only in their unusual appearance, and they care for their fragile mortal sister with great tenderness. As a young woman, Medusa is raped by Poseidon in Athene's temple. The goddess is so offended by this sacrilege that she punishes the victim, replacing Medusa's hair with snakes and bestowing her most famous attribute: the ability to turn any living creature to stone by eye contact. In a third thread, the demigod Perseus comes of age as a bumbling incompetent: self-serving, lazy, whining, unnecessarily violent.
These threads come together in complex ways when gods are offended and angered and play out their dramas with mortal pawns. Traditional storytelling has cast Perseus as a hero and Medusa as a monster, but Haynes does not concur: "The hero isn't the one who's kind or brave or loyal. Sometimes--not always, but sometimes--he is monstrous. And the monster? Who is she?"
Haynes's genius lies not only in her subtle recasting of this story--with an emphasis on who assigns roles and draws conclusions--but also in her dryly scathing humor. Haynes writes in many voices: those of olive trees, Medusa's snakes-for-hair, a crow, the gods and mortals that make up this twisting tale. A surprising ending caps off her truly delightful and novel version of a very old story. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia