Madeline Miller’s Circe takes a character most people know from one episode of the Odyssey, the witch who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs, and gives her the whole story. I’ve loved the Iliad and the Odyssey for years, and this book made me realize I’d only ever seen Circe from the doorway.

It opens in the halls of her father, Helios. Circe is the odd one out in a family of gods. She’s plain by their standards, and her relatives mock her thin voice for sounding mortal. She’s drawn to the things the other gods ignore, mortals most of all. Then she discovers she can work pharmaka, the magic of herbs, and uses it in ways she can’t take back. She turns the fisherman she loves into a god, and the nymph he leaves her for into a monster. The gods decide someone has to pay, and Circe is banished to the island of Aiaia for good.

Most of the novel happens on Aiaia, and that’s where it really took hold of me. Alone on the island, Circe teaches herself witchcraft, and Miller makes it feel like actual work. Her spells look less like wand-waving and more like cooking or gardening. She gathers plants, grinds them, waits, gets it wrong and tries again. Over the centuries visitors pass through: Hermes, Daedalus, Medea and eventually Odysseus. Each one teaches her something about what she wants and what she won’t put up with.

What impressed me most is how Miller handles the famous pig scene. In Homer it’s a dangerous witch’s mischief. Here it starts after a ship’s crew she welcomed and fed turns on her, and their captain rapes her. Suddenly the transformations read as self-defense, and they change how you see every earlier version of Circe. That’s the book’s real trick. Miller doesn’t throw out the myths. She keeps the events and asks what they looked like from Circe’s side.

Her relationships are just as tangled. Hermes is charming and completely untrustworthy. Odysseus is clever and warm, and he’s also exactly the man the Odyssey says he is, which isn’t always flattering. The relationship that hit me hardest is the one with her son, Telegonus. It turns the last third of the book into a story about how far a parent will go to protect a child, and what it costs to finally let him go.

If I have one complaint, it’s that the middle sags a little. The years on Aiaia can feel like a string of episodes, one visitor after another. But those slow stretches are also where Circe changes the most, so I’m not sure I’d cut them.

By the end she’s nothing like the lonely girl in her father’s hall. The power was never really the point. By the last chapter she knows what she wants and is willing to choose it, even when it’s a strange choice for an immortal to make. I won’t spoil it, but it’s one of the best endings I’ve read in a long time.

If you love Greek myths, or you’ve ever wondered about the women standing at the edges of the old stories, read Circe.