Adding this to the advantage of being trained and mentored by Artemis herself, creates an extremely formidable young woman. Atalanta became an incredibly skilled fighter and hunter under the goddess' watchful eye – greater than any other woman, and man too.

Raised by a mother bear under the protective eye of the goddess Artemis, Atalanta grows up wild and free, with just one condition: if she marries, Artemis warns, it will be her undoing. So when Artemis tasks her to join the heroic quest of Jason and his Argonauts, Atalanta is eager to join the adventure and bring glory to her goddess. Imagine if a man found one of us here without her, came across a nymph bathing alone, disrobed and vulnerable?

Left exposed on a mountainside, the defenceless infant Atalanta is left to the mercy of a passing mother bear and raised alongside the cubs under the protective eye of the goddess Artemis. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.

However, there is also a tenderness to her that balances her personality so that she feels like a true heroine. I knew a little about the Argonauts but certainly didn’t know there was a female one, so it was fascinating to read her story. That’s why I was delighted when Jennifer Saint chose Atalanta as the subject for her next myth novel, following Ariadne and Elektra.Steeped in mythology Atalanta is a magnificent, completely immersive tale that I adored because I found it both incredibly absorbing and thrillingly exciting. 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. I don’t remember exactly the moment when I first encountered Atalanta in mythology – her stories are quite disparate and episodic, and I didn’t have a strong sense of her as a character particularly. Like in her previous books, Saint gives a voice to a female from Greek mythology that doesn’t often get one. If you’re a fan of Greek mythology retellings with beautiful writing and vivid characters, then Atalanta is an absolute must read.

It’s almost a year since lovely Caitlin Raynor sent me a surprise copy of Atalanta by Jennifer Saint and with the paperback release a month away it’s high time I got round to sharing my review.This may result in small marks to the dustjacket and title page, please also bear in mind that each signature will be a little different from the one we show here. So constructing her character meant inventing a backstory and using the figure we meet on stage to work backwards and understand how she became so warped and twisted in her thinking in the first place. This novel is a coming of age story, and Meleager is one of the characters who helps Atalanta realise what it is she really wants out of life. It was their task to teach me what she found too tedious; for them to guide me to understand how they talked, and to learn, haltingly at first, how to respond; for them to show me how to weave the cloth from which they made the simple tunics they all wore, and how to honor the other gods and goddesses whose names they taught me, though none of them ever came to our forest.

Similarly, Atalanta appears in several different myths but they’re very fragmented, so creating the connective tissues that make these disparate episodes into a life is part of the challenge and part of the magic too! JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses.While they did so, Crocale slid the tunic from Artemis’s shoulders and swept up her hair as the goddess stepped naked into the water. Ariadne was an instant Sunday Times bestseller, shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year in 2021 and was Waterstones Book of the month in January 2022. The fight sequences are too brief, the epic quests go by too fast, characters vanish before the end of their story can be told, and the book’s conclusion (don’t worry – I won’t tell you anything about it! Despite her closeness to Artemis, she’s not foolish enough to rely upon the goddess as a protector: she has seen first-hand that the gods can be cold and capricious, and all she wants from Artemis is the chance to prove herself. Bringing these women back into the spotlight is really important to me – their stories allow us to peel back the layers of myths we think we know so well, and to see all the layers and complexity beneath the quests and gods and monsters and battles we’ve enjoyed before!