A Pirate’s Life for Me

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I have a fascination with pirates that I blame primarily on Pirates of the Caribbean. Chances are, if I see a book about pirates, I’m going to pick it up. Obviously, I know on a logical level that the pirate books I’ve read (like Fable by Adrienne Young or Daughter of the Pirate King by Tricia Levenseller) aren’t exactly accurate portrayals of piracy, but since these–and many other pirate books I love and am valiantly resisting the urge to list–are young adult fantasy books, I was content not to think too hard about why.…

Fish Out of Water: Visiting The Little Mermaid Statue in Copenhagen

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This past May, I went on a TPG trip to various Scandinavian cities, including Copenhagen, Denmark. The trip was entitled “Wellness in Scandinavia,” and was part of my work with wellness promotion and harm reduction on campus with The Bishop Way. The Scandinavian region was selected because of their consistently high ratings on the World Happiness Report, the two nations we visited–Sweden and Denmark–ranking fourth and second, respectively (for reference, the U.S.…

Maiden, Myth, Muse: Cassandra, Princess of Troy

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I have a habit of needing to know everything there is to know about the media that I consume–books, movies, songs–that’s given me a lot of random and mostly useless knowledge. I read the Acknowledgements section in books, Wikipedia asks me for money a lot because I’m always looking up actors and singers, and I frequently say the phrase “I need to know the lore.”…

Women of Myth & History: The Assyrian Queen

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The figure who inspired Babylonia was unknown to me before reading this novel, but I did recognize two other aspects of the book–the author, Costanza Casati, and my fondness for books with blades on the cover. A little different from the previous books in this series, there is at least confirmation of its titular figure being a real person. …

Women of Myth & History: The Evil Stepmother

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Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel follows the titular character, Kaikeyi, a figure from the Hindu epic the Ramayana, which I’m admittedly much less familiar with than Greek mythology. Unlike Circe, I was drawn to this book (and impulse bought it at a Goodwill bookstore) less out of familiarity with the original story and more out of my interest in stories of mythology.…

Women of Myth & History: The Greek Sorceress

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My fascination with the stories of women in myth and history began with Circe. My first exposure to the mythological figure of Circe was in The Sea of Monsters, book 2 of the Percy Jackson series. Embarrassingly, it wasn’t until I read the Odyssey for the first time my freshman year of high school that I realized the “real” Circe does not, in fact, turn men into guinea pigs, but into regular pigs.…

Something Old, Something New: Modern Retellings & Reimaginings

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Like most young children, I went through various periods of media obsession, including a Disney princess phase and later a Percy Jackson and the Olympians phase. My love of tales like Beauty and the Beast and interest in the aspects of Greek mythology explored in Rick Riordan’s beloved mid-2000s series grew into a long-standing fascination with stories that get retold and reimagined.…