Atalanta: The dazzling story of the only female Argonaut

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I remember my first sight of the grove where she led me, stepping out from the cluster of cypress trees behind her. They intruded on our forest every now and again, horns blaring and the thunder of their shouts startling the birds from the treetops, but in all their noise and chaos, they never knew for a moment how close they might pass to me, a nymph, or the goddess herself.

Atalanta really has a story of incredible greatness, and her feats are equal in magnitude to those of her contemporary and well documented male heroes. The Argonauts’ quest for the Golden Fleece is filled with impossible challenges, but Atalanta proves herself equal to the men she fights alongside. I have to admit that I looked forward to the arrival of Medea, and thoroughly enjoyed the way events immediately started to revolve around her – much to Atalanta’s disgust! Girls like Anne Shirley (of Anne of Green Gables) who aren’t defined by their relationships to boys or men, who have ambition and spirit and learn resilience and perseverance.Her arrow pierced its throat in an instant, before its liquid brown eyes could register the danger it had run into, and it slumped down, a trickle of red sliding down below the slender wooden shaft of her weapon.

I loved learning about her upbringing and the fate she was destined to live, but I was mostly moved by her love stories.Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. And, yes, these are important insights into the challenges, joys, and sorrows of the life of these women. Jealous gods, duplicitous royalty, valiant and dangerous argonauts, gentle nymphs and a wide range of beasts, birds and so on, all weave into a rich tapestry. This is a retelling that fully inhabits the magical realm of myth while losing none of its human heart. Swearing that she will prove her worth alongside the famed heroes of Greece, Atalanta leaves her forest to join Jason’s band of Argonauts.

Jennifer Saint deftly draws the reader into the legends of Atalanta, swift huntress and favorite of Artemis, bringing the world of ancient Greece alive. As always Saint brings Ancient Greece to life with deft story-telling and lyrical imagery, but with her third outing we are drawn into a truly empowering story - a novel of strength and resilience, love and friendship, skillfully enthused with the addictive magic of timeless myth. Her voice, low and urgent in my ear as she breathed her instructions: how to watch for the movement of the deer hidden deep among the ferns, how to render myself motionless, invisible, eyes fixed on the target, the bow strung taut in my hands until there was nothing left in the world but me and my quarry. Not like Atalanta here, who can already run across the mountainsides with her all day and come back refreshed and ready for more.

I love the beautiful covers that take Greek vase motifs and make them sparkly (not that I’m superficial or anything…! One of the many elements, I savoured when enjoying this book, was Jennifer’s ability, to bring Atalanta to life, the complexities of her personality, the evolution of her emotions, the essence of her aspirations, and the myriad of trials and tribulations she has to face.

Where with the story of Odysseus, for example, I know each of the different foes he came across on his journey, this time around every day of the quest something new and unexpected came along.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. It retells the events of the Trojan War, giving a lot of time and sympathy to the character of Helen, so I think it really imprinted on me early on that the women of the myths have a great story to tell too! It raised another question for me: Though I was growing swiftly all the time, and was almost as tall as the nymphs were already, why did they never seem to change?