If what gripped you in Kaikeyi was inhabiting Kaikeyi’s voice from girlhood to queenship—watching her discover the Binding Plane, shape alliances in Ayodhya, and make those fateful boons that exile Rama—then Circe offers a similarly intimate, character-led retelling. You’ll follow Circe from her neglected youth among the Titans to her hard-won autonomy on Aiaia, as she learns witchcraft, confronts gods like Hermes and Athena, and defies the roles laid out for her. It’s the same spell of a woman reclaiming her myth by telling it herself.

Loved the tense palace negotiations in Kaikeyi—the queens’ alliances and rivalries, Kaikeyi’s women’s council, and her deft steering of Kosala’s politics around Dasharatha and his heirs? The Jasmine Throne immerses you in another richly textured court, where Princess Malini and the maidservant-priestess Priya navigate coups, heresy, and rebellion. The stakes feel as visceral as Kaikeyi’s bid to secure Bharata’s future, with every whispered conversation threatening to reshape a kingdom.

If Kaikeyi’s hardest choices—wielding the boons to crown Bharata and send Rama into exile, tugging the bonds between kin and court—hooked you for their audacious, morally complicated calculus, you’ll be riveted by Zhu’s rise. In She Who Became the Sun, Zhu seizes a foretold destiny through ruthless strategy and razor-edged self-belief, facing rivals as formidable as any in Ayodhya while weighing love, survival, and empire. It scratches that same itch for ambition complicated by consequence.

If the emotional core of Kaikeyi—her private fears, fierce love for Bharata, and the ache of being branded a villain even as she believes she’s protecting her family—stayed with you, The Witch’s Heart will, too. Angrboda recounts her life with Loki, the tenderness of raising Hel, Fenrir, and Jormungandr, and the impossible choices that follow. Like Kaikeyi’s first-person confessional, it turns a myth’s supposed antagonist into a fully realized woman whose inner life drives the story.

If you connected with Kaikeyi’s journey of self-definition—learning to read the world’s hidden threads, carving out a role beyond what fathers, husbands, and sages allowed—Spear offers that same thrill of becoming. Peretur leaves her secluded life to claim a place among Arthur’s knights, crafting her identity through trial, desire, and skill. The focused, lyrical voice echoes Kaikeyi’s intimate path from constrained girlhood to self-fashioned power.