Excerpt from Ariadne by Jennifer Saint, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The union was the forbidden subject of gossip on Crete, but whispers of it reached me, snaking around me in tendrils of malice and mockery. It was a gift to resentful nobles, laughing merchants, brooding slaves, girls riven with fascinated, ghoulish horror, young men entranced with the daring freakishness of it; the mutterings and murmurings and disapproving hisses and sniggering jeers were carried on the wind into every corner of the palace itself. Poseidon, while seeming to miss his target, had struck with deadly accuracy. Leaving Minos untouched but disgracing his wife in so grotesque a fashion humbled the man—cuckolded by a dumb beast and wedded to a woman frenzied with unnatural desires.

Pasiphae was beautiful, and her divine heritage had made her a magnificent prize to Minos in marriage. It was her very delicacy, her refinement, and her sweetness that had made her his boast and must have made her degradation seem so very delectable to Poseidon. If you had anything that made you proud, that elevated you above your mortal fellows, it seemed to me that the gods would find delight in smashing it to smithereens. One morning, not long after Pasiphae's ruin, I reflected on this. As I was combing through my little sister's silken tresses, a gift we shared from our radiant mother, I began to weep, fearfully regarding each golden curl as bait to those divine colossi that strode the heavens and could snatch up our tiny triumphs and rub them into dust between their immortal fingers.

My handmaiden, Eirene, found me sobbing into a bemused Phaedra's hair. "Ariadne," she crooned. She must have pitied me and the particularly grotesque way in which the innocence of my childhood had been so shaken. "What's the matter?"

No doubt she thought I cried for my mother's shame, but I had a child's self-absorption and I was worried now for me. "What if the gods—" I gulped through my tears. "What if they take my hair and leave me bald and ugly?"

Perhaps Eirene suppressed a smile, but she did not let me see. Instead, she gently shifted me away from Phaedra and took up the comb herself. "And why would they do such a thing?"

"If Father makes them angry again!" I cried. "Maybe they will take my hair so he is shamed by a hideous daughter."

Phaedra wrinkled her nose. "Princesses can't be bald," she said decisively.

A bald princess would be useless. Minos had always spoken of the marriage I would make one day, a glorious union that would heap honor upon Crete. He should not have boasted. The creeping realization chilled my bones. How could I defend myself against his wrongdoing? If the gods were offended by him and struck down his wife, then why not his daughter?

Excerpted from Ariadne by Jennifer Saint. Copyright © 2021 by Jennifer Saint. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.