If you were drawn to Circe’s exile on Aiaia—her herbcraft, risky spells, and fierce protection of Telegonus—The Witch’s Heart offers a kindred pulse. Angrboda forges her own path after defying Odin, binds her life to Loki, and fiercely mothers children fated for doom. The intimate magic, godly machinations, and a woman’s hard-won autonomy echo Circe turning sailors to swine for survival and defying Athena’s threats to shield her son.

Loved how Circe refuses to be a minor daughter of Helios and instead carves power in exile, midwifes the Minotaur for Pasiphae, and outmaneuvers gods to protect her child? In Kaikeyi, a sidelined queen from the Ramayana seizes influence through sacred rites and shrewd statecraft. Her morally knotty choices—like the decision that upends a hero’s path—mirror the same survival-hearted calculus behind Circe’s transformations and her long game against Athena.

If the sensuous, patient magic of Circe—brewing potions, learning the language of plants, and weaving spells that turned the tide against Scylla—enchanted you, Uprooted will feel like stepping into a similarly spell-dense grove. Agnieszka’s woodland magic unfurls in vivid, tactile prose; her uneasy mentorship and boundary-pushing spells echo the way Circe hones her craft alone on Aiaia until she can protect her home from men and monsters alike.

If Circe’s confiding I-voice—recounting her bond with Daedalus, her fraught encounters with Hermes and Athena, and her complicated year with Odysseus—pulled you in, The Song of Achilles offers that same closeness. Patroclus narrates his love for Achilles with aching immediacy, while divine pressure (Thetis’s implacable will) and the Trojan War—so entwined with Odysseus’s fate after leaving Aiaia—cast a familiar, human-shadowed light over epic events.

If what lingered from Circe was her slow claiming of self—no longer just Helios’s overlooked daughter, but the witch who chooses love, confronts gods, and mothers Telegonus—Lavinia resonates. Le Guin brings a silent figure from the Aeneid into her own voice, as Lavinia contemplates fate, speaks with the poet shaping her life, and steers her future amid war and rule. It’s the same inward, resolute becoming that made Circe’s final choices so powerful.