✦ Current Reads: Myth, Medicine & Madness ✦

There’s a peculiar alchemy to stories that drag you right into worlds as tangled and unpredictable as the one outside your window. Some stories reach deep into the marrow of ancient myths, prying them open with a razor’s edge, while others paint Victorian streets so vividly you can almost hear the echo of boots on cobblestones and smell the smoke in the air. On the surface, the two books I’m about to introduce seem worlds apart: one anchored in myth, the other in the grit of 19th-century Edinburgh. Yet underneath, both novels pulse with the same fierce heartbeat — women who refuse to be broken, women who carve out their own voices and fates in places determined to silence them.

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood is a book I keep returning to, always finding new bruises and glimmers in its pages. Atwood has a way of seizing the bones of old stories — stories we think we know, stories that have grown dusty with repetition — and twisting them until they bleed something utterly unexpected. With The Penelopiad, she hands the narrative to Penelope, a figure long relegated to the background of The Odyssey, depicted as the ever-faithful wife simply waiting for her husband’s return. But Atwood’s Penelope is no passive shadow. She’s witty, blisteringly honest, and brimming with a grief edged by rage. Through Penelope’s eyes, the myth cracks open: loyalty becomes a burden, heroism a mask, and the sacrifices demanded of women are revealed in their full, raw cost. The book resounds with the sense of a woman finally allowed to speak — not in whispers, but in a voice that’s acerbic, mournful, and full of dark humor.

Reading it, you can almost feel yourself in that ancient world: the flicker of candlelight on rough stone, the salt tang of the sea outside, and a simmering fury that’s lain dormant for centuries. Atwood’s writing is a kind of incantation, inviting us to question the stories we inherit and the roles we’re expected to play. “Now that I’m dead, I know everything,” Penelope declares, and it’s both a lament and a liberation. The Penelopiad is lyrical and haunted, a searing meditation on what it means to survive not just the storms of the world, but the storms inside ourselves. It lingers in your mind, prompting you to reconsider what you’ve always believed about myth, memory, and the invisible costs of endurance.

If you’re drawn instead to shadows and secrets, E.S. Thomson’s The Blood offers a darker, denser kind of immersion. This novel is atmospheric in the truest sense: you don’t just read about Victorian Edinburgh — you breathe it in, thick with fog, chemical tang, and suspicion. Jem Flockhart, the apothecary at the heart of the story, is a character who blazes quietly through the muck and menace of her world. She navigates the city’s labyrinthine underbelly with a wary intelligence, her sharp mind and sharper instincts both shield and weapon. Thomson’s Edinburgh is no romanticized tableau; it’s alive with filth and fear, its every corner hiding a new threat or sorrow.

But The Blood is more than a masterful historical mystery. It’s a meditation on what it means to live on the margins — to exist in the in-between spaces, where identity and survival are constant negotiations. Every chapter crackles with tension, and beneath the plot’s twists runs a current of empathy for those who must fight simply to exist. Thomson’s writing is so vivid that you can almost taste the bitterness of medicines, feel the chill of the city’s damp stones, and sense the weight of secrets pressing down on the characters. If you relish historical fiction that’s unafraid to get its hands dirty — to plunge into the discomfort and danger of the past — this book is an absolute revelation.

Both Atwood and Thomson give us women who refuse to just endure their circumstances. Their heroines are complicated: full of wit, anger, cunning, and resilience. The Penelopiad interrogates the myths that have shaped — and often trapped — women for millennia, while The Blood explores the daily, embodied struggle to survive in a world eager to erase you. Each novel, in its own way, insists on the power of women’s voices, even when those voices are forced to speak from the shadows or from beyond the grave.

What unites these books is not just their darkness, but the luminous strength that pulses through it. They remind us that stories are not just entertainment — they’re a way of reclaiming space, of rewriting the rules, of refusing to be forgotten. Long after you finish the last page, both The Penelopiad and The Blood linger with you, like a bruise that aches in the dark, or a secret tattoo inked beneath the skin — a testament to the wild, unbreakable will to survive, to speak, and to be seen.