Jason of Iolcos assembled the greatest company of heroes the world had seen and sailed to the edge of it. He came back with the Golden Fleece. He did not come back with what it cost. This is the story the myth has always contained but never fully told: what happens when the woman who makes the heroism possible is discarded when the heroism is complete. Medea - granddaughter of Helios, the most powerful sorceress in Colchis - gave Jason everything.
The impossible tasks made possible. The dragon put to sleep. The Fleece taken from its sacred tree. Her father, her home, her brother, the only world she had built before the ship arrived. She gave him all of it and she followed him into Greece and she gave him the years in Iolcos and the sons and the quiet ordinary goodness of the life after the quest. When Jason set it down for the Corinthian princess - for the ordinary life, the Greek wife, the alliance that offered everything a man of decent gifts and limited understanding was permitted to want - Medea understood what the love had always been underneath the love.
What she did with that understanding is the question this book answers. JASON: What She Gave Him is the fourth novel in the Olympus Cycle - literary fiction set in the world of ancient Greece, where the interior lives of its characters are the territory, the dialogue makes them live, and the myths are the bones of something that has always been about us.
Jason of Iolcos assembled the greatest company of heroes the world had seen and sailed to the edge of it. He came back with the Golden Fleece. He did not come back with what it cost. This is the story the myth has always contained but never fully told: what happens when the woman who makes the heroism possible is discarded when the heroism is complete. Medea - granddaughter of Helios, the most powerful sorceress in Colchis - gave Jason everything.
The impossible tasks made possible. The dragon put to sleep. The Fleece taken from its sacred tree. Her father, her home, her brother, the only world she had built before the ship arrived. She gave him all of it and she followed him into Greece and she gave him the years in Iolcos and the sons and the quiet ordinary goodness of the life after the quest. When Jason set it down for the Corinthian princess - for the ordinary life, the Greek wife, the alliance that offered everything a man of decent gifts and limited understanding was permitted to want - Medea understood what the love had always been underneath the love.
What she did with that understanding is the question this book answers. JASON: What She Gave Him is the fourth novel in the Olympus Cycle - literary fiction set in the world of ancient Greece, where the interior lives of its characters are the territory, the dialogue makes them live, and the myths are the bones of something that has always been about us.