To be honest, I am not sure if I was just not in the right head space to read No Friend to This House because I am experiencing Greek mythology fatigue, or if No Friend to This House is just not as good as Natalie Haynes’s previous novels, because I found this one to be boring.

No Friend to This House is about Medea, the sorceress who helps Jason of the Argonauts obtain the Golden Fleece. Medea is shot with one of Eros’s arrows so that she will fall in love with Jason and help him in his quest for the Golden Fleece. Jason marries Medea in exchange for her help, but after ten years of marriage, he plans on abandoning her and their children to marry King Creon’s daughter, Creusa. Medea gets revenge against Jason’s unfaithfulness by using their sons to deliver poisoned clothing to Creusa, and then she murders their sons.

Medea is certainly a victim of external forces when cupid’s arrow coerces her to fall in love with a narcissistic twat like Jason, a selfish, useless man who uses Medea and then abandons her when a better opportunity comes along. But I found that No Friend to This House does not a good job at explaining why Medea debases herself so terribly by using her own children as pawns in her revenge plot against Jason so that she ends up having to kill them. The narrative point of view of the novel shifts to someone else every time Medea does something monstrous, and the reaction is the standard women-vilifying perspective, but when the narrative shifts back to Medea’s perspective, she does not really explain her actions, she just offers lame excuses. I don’t buy that it was the love for Jason what was forced upon her that turned her into a child-killing monster because that means her motivation is petty jealousy. If No Friend to This House is supposed to be a feminist retelling of Medea’s story that makes me feel empathy for her, it fails in that regard.

I also did not like how each chapter of this novel changed to a different perspective. I feel that jumping around to so many different characters made the characters lack the emotional depth you will find in Madeline Miller’s novels or even in Haynes’s previous novels. I wish Haynes had tightened up the story and focused more on Medea so that I felt like I understood her, instead of leaving me feeling like what was the point of reading this.