Content Warning: This section features mentions of rape, violence against children, and child death.

Ariadne is set in ancient Greece, a time and place in which women’s standing in society was precarious and vulnerable. As the novel demonstrates, women were often pawns in the games of men—maneuvered and used and then discarded once they were no longer useful. In countless myths, it is the women who are punished for men’s transgressions and sins, while women’s own transgressions taint their reputations irreparably and even cost them their lives. Saint gives voice to the female figures in the well-known myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to explore the ways in which women quietly but powerfully facilitated men’s victories and navigated their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers.

The novel’s female characters are defined by their usefulness to men; they are either collateral in men’s schemes or deemed useless. Coupled with the fact that women largely lack the resources to control their own lives, this means that relationship between men and women become largely transactional; men maneuver women for their own personal gain, while women have little choice but to look to men for a means of escaping their current situation or improving their lives.