Patricia Galloway, Snake Dreamer (New York: Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 1998). ISBN 9780385322645.
Nancy Springer, Dusssie (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2007). ISBN 9780802796493.
Julie Berry, If Looks Could Kill (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2025). ISBN 9781534470835.
Reviewed by Nava R. Cohen, Northwestern University, navacohen2007@u.northwestern.edu
Our definition of a hero has expanded in recent decades to include figures not traditionally understood within this category. As they say on the Internet, “not all heroes wear capes!” One particularly unlikely hero to emerge is the iconic Medusa, whose appearance is familiar even to those not well-versed in mythology. Traditionally depicted as a terrifying monster, modern Medusa has become relatable, with her representations spanning a wide variety of media. One popular example is Luciano Garbati’s 2008 statue, “Medusa With the Head of Perseus,” which, capitalizing on a “girlboss” empowerment vibe, has been repurposed as an emblem of the #MeToo era.1
Advertisements featuring Medusa, of which there are many, may suggest eroticism, not horror. Cartoons with her snaky head also abound, and these representations tend to portray her everyday struggles with hair care, dating, and home management.2 Beyond the trajectory of monster to femme fatale to feminist heroine traced by Leeming,3 Medusa has evolved to speak directly to girls and women.
In recent Anglophone literature, there has been an explosion of Medusa stories, written for a variety of audiences. Depicted as the garden shop owner Aunty Em who is “still sweet on” Poseidon in Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief,4 she more recently appeared in Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind as a tenderhearted woman who submits to Poseidon to prevent him from killing innocent girls.5 In Ayana Gray’s retelling, I, Medusa, loc-wearing teenaged Medusa becomes a vigilante who protects vulnerable women after enduring Poseidon’s assault.6 Authors address audiences who range from toddlers7 to middle school readers;8 multiple books for teenagers and adults have been published in the last five years, even adapting her myth beyond the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia.9 To judge from the volume and acceleration of publications, the popularity of Medusa’s story has grown with time. Hopman points out that Medusa (among other hybrid creatures) “can hardly be described in relation to a stable appearance or recurring character traits”10 and yet, young readers familiar with Medusa approach her character with set expectations. As such, some of these tales take an expected path, but others open up the character of Medusa to new and expansive interpretations. Medusa can now be found as a mother, aunt, sister, or friend; a nurturing mentor, a young girl discovering herself, or a survivor ensuring that other young women need not experience the violence she has endured. All of these identities merit consideration as we decide anew what Medusa means to us in the 21st century.
The scope of this review pales in comparison to the number of titles published in the last 30 years, and a comprehensive study of Medusa’s portrayal for children and adult readers would be a useful tool for scholars, librarians, teachers, and the reading public. In the meantime, I would like to introduce the works of three authors of YA and middle grade fiction who, over the past three decades, have taken Medusa in unexpected directions. A recent New Yorker article considering how monsters have become “so awfully nice” explains that modernity has “shifted the coördinates of monstrosity” so that we “see the humanity in the monstrous—and … see as monstrous those we think fail to do the same.”11 In this vein, and despite diverse narrative circumstances, these three authors have converged in creating Medusa figures that support young readers navigating the process of growing up.
Patricia Galloway creates a horror story with both a predictable outcome and an unexpected ending in her out-of-print 1998 YA novel Snake Dreamer. Throughout the novel the reader—and to a lesser extent the protagonist Dusa—suspects that the mysterious Doctors Teno and Yali Gordon are not actually child psychologists. The two doctors run a clinic on an isolated Mediterranean island for young girls suffering from dreams filled with snakes. They recruit sixteen-year-old Dusa, whose snaky dreams started with menarche and have since increased to seizure-inducing, life-threatening intensity. While Teno and Yali have promised Dusa and her mother that they can treat Dusa’s symptoms, their actual motivation involves using Dusa’s visions to locate something that is buried on their island. Radically isolated, Dusa finds both skeletal and living evidence of victimized patients whom the doctors discarded. When Dusa finds and identifies the buried object as Medusa’s head, her expectations are realized: the Gordons are Gorgons. However—spoiler warning! – she, along with the reader, does not expect what happens next. It is Medusa, decapitated and dormant, but still alive, who, for reasons that remain unclear, has sent the snake dreams to girls whom she identifies as her daughters, “blood of my blood” (p. 202). And when Dusa questions Medusa about the violence of her past, Medusa reorients Dusa’s perspective: “I never wished to kill anyone. Dusa, you have read the old stories as they have come down to your time. Do those stories show me seeking out humans to destroy them?” (p. 204). Medusa herself excavates a counternarrative that has never actually been hidden. Her nurturing voice prompts the protagonist – and readers – to read against the grain of received tradition.
The horror of this text is amplified by its lack of clarity regarding Teno/Stheno’s and Yali/Euryale’s project. The book never resolves their purposes; all that is clear is that Dusa is in mortal danger on the island. In a surprising twist, Dusa finds that she has grown fond of the snakes that populate her dreams, comforting her throughout her terrifying sojourn in the Gor(d/g)ons’ clinic. Medusa, helping Dusa escape, reassures her that she can always summon her snakes to serve as a connection between girl and Gorgon.
Snake Dreamer is a quirky novel that did not receive much attention beyond book reviews aimed at librarians and teachers. The one critical piece that addresses the novel, in an edited volume considering women’s literary responses to male-centered stories, finds the novel disappointing.12 The author, Elise Earthman, criticizes Galloway for failing to “tell a story that could be more empowering to girls like Dusa who are reading” (p. 166). She characterizes Dusa as “terribly shallow,” given her enjoyment of “creature comforts” and “more than a little dense” because she does not identify the mythological story she inhabits sooner (p. 166). (This second criticism strikes me as terribly unfair to both Dusa, who does not have the advantage of our bird’s-eye view, as well as the genre: in this quasi-realistic novel, a supernatural explanation must be delayed as long as possible.) Earthman further bemoans the lost opportunity to give Medusa agency, leaving her “only a weapon in the hands of others” (p. 167). A final criticism, rooted in late twentieth-century discourse and second-wave feminism, focuses on the portrayal of Teno and Yali. Earthman claims that rather than celebrate them as “two wonderfully competent and powerful women,” Galloway takes “an extremely conservative vision of the modern career woman” by maintaining their status as villainous monsters (p. 167). Reading this novel almost three decades later, however, I see Galloway’s choice as a significant support for her young readers: although we may crave the solidarity of sisterhood, not all powerful women are allies. Evidence of this truth makes the news on a regular basis, but a narrative story’s ability to convince exceeds that of news stories. As such, the shocking reveal of Teno and Yali’s true nature emphatically reinforces the necessity of making judicious choices about whom to trust.Trust also underlies a second significant support Galloway provides readers. Careful evaluation of sources has, in recent years, become of utmost importance. Dusa does not need to be told she must evaluate received ideas carefully; this conclusion becomes self-evident to both Dusa and readers once Medusa has told her own story. The lesson, certainly valuable for impetuous youth in any era, takes on added urgency with the advent of readily available artificial intelligence bearing plausible false narratives. What better message to provide young readers who inhabit 2026’s accelerating digital dystopia than the urgency of reading our reality more critically?
Nancy Springer’s 2007 middle grade novel Dusssie addresses a more personal concern: the angst teenagers experience over their changing bodies. Thirteen-year-old Dusie believed that “everything depended on how I looked” (p. 2). Annoyed by the onset of her first period overnight, she is even more annoyed by her mother’s sentimental response at which young readers may cringe in horror or horrified recognition. In the morning, worrying about clothing choices and “whether boys could tell when you got your period” (p. 2), Dusie suddenly realizes that twenty-seven snakes are growing out of her head. The anagnorisis she experiences, paired with a profound (and developmentally appropriate) desire to be like everyone else, provides the motivation for Dusie’s quest throughout the novel, which takes place over a single month, from new moon to new moon.
The author, who published her first Enola Holmes novel the year before Dusssie, draws on themes young readers have found in media ranging from Judy Blume’s 1970 Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret to the 2022 Pixar film Turning Red. Intertwined with issues of emerging womanhood are concerns about coming to terms with family heritage and developing independent values and identity. Dusie – as you might have guessed – is short for Medusa, but Dusie is not the ancient mythical creature. Named after her long-dead aunt Medusa, she is the daughter of the glamorous celebrity sculptor Euryale Gorgon, who, it turns out, has used neither her hands nor a chisel to create her critically acclaimed masterpieces. As a single mother, Euryale relies on the advice of “the Sisterhood,” a group of mythical and monstrous women who live in New York because they are artists—glamorous, grotesque, and non-conforming.
Dusie—like most teenagers would do—blames her mother for her abnormality and rejects the help of her Sisterhood, whose irregularities she sees as freakishness barely disguised under a pseudo-normal facade. She is desperate to be truly normal. In this early-millennium narrative—which I am tempted to call a period piece—Dusie turns off her phone and heads to the New York Public Library to find a remedy.
Complicating matters is that Dusie does not know who her (human) father was. Angry at Euryale for her secrecy, Dusie rejects her mother’s overtures, responding monosyllabically to Euryale’s ongoing inquiries about her activities and emotional state. Eventually Euryale relents and brings Dusie to the Whitney Museum to see her most famous sculpture: this is her father. Euryale explains—with details that could have been ripped from today’s headlines—that when immigration officials came to deport him, he refused to allow her to hurt them, even to save his life. Dusie begins to understand that her “quirky” father’s unconditional love changed Euryale from “venomous” and “slug-ugly” to the nurturing woman Dusie knows (pp. 146 and 160). She is inspired to emulate him and the resulting compassion extends even to her snakes.
Retellings and adaptations may alter many variables of myth, but there is no Medusa without snakes. Dusie initially encounters her snakes as antagonists, and an early quarrel with them leads her to put her head in the freezer after they bite her. As their relationship evolves, however, Dusie finds that the snakes provide her with both reflections of and counterpoints to her own thoughts. When they speak to her, it is with hissing voices (thus the extra –ss– of her name in the title), but their antagonistic voices soon become affectionate. When the remedy she locates would eliminate them, the way that her snakes prioritize Dusie’s well-being over their own demonstrates a serpentine version of humanity. Like Galloway’s Dusa, Dusie grows to love her head snakes, and their mutual love allows her to embrace her uniqueness. She explains this result to the Sisterhood: ”They make me be myself, not just what other people want me to be….They’re me but they’re themselves, too” (p. 153). Dusie credits the snakes with uncovering her latent abilities: “They’re strong, so I’m strong, too, and I never knew I could be strong. And I never knew I could enjoy myself by myself” (p. 153). By the end of the novel, Dusie has found a way (no spoiler this time!) to integrate her uniqueness into a suitably conventional outward appearance, and, armed with hybrid identity, return to her friends, her school, and the typical pursuits of a twenty-first century teenager.
Snake Dreamer explicitly focuses on issues of survival. Although Dusssie centers on identity, the underlying questions this novel raises – “am I normal?” and “will anyone ever love me?” are ultimately also timeless questions of survival. The novel shows young readers that even those with differences – which is, of course, all of us – can give and receive love. Dusssie demonstrates that choosing to accept ourselves for who we are also allows us to direct that same compassion outward.
Julie Berry’s 2025 If Looks Could Kill takes an entirely different approach to the Medusa myth. This YA novel, a fusion of fantasy and historical fiction, does not retell the ancient story, nor does it feature ancient Medusa or her descendants. Berry sets her novel in 1888-1889, alternating perspectives between Tabitha, a teenage Salvation Army “soldier” ministering to the poor on New York’s Lower East Side and Jack, a doctor trying to cure his fatal wasting illness by grisly means: consuming the organs of young women he has murdered. Clearly, this book does not need a third plot, and for the most part, Berry avoids Greek mythology. Instead, she depicts women turned into Medusas by incidental contact with Jack. The women do not understand what has happened or why, but they “feel the pull,” sensing men who have hurt women and whom they are irresistibly drawn to punish (p. 197).The book begins with a striking frontispiece, reproduced with less detail on the cover.
An attractive woman with loose hair trains her gaze to the reader’s right. Her head and bare shoulders fill the top two-thirds of the page, then fade to a grimy late nineteenth century urban scene filled with smokestacks and industrial buildings, train tracks and smoke, and tiny people making their way through a downtown. Her expression is predatory and interspersed among her locks are, of course, snakes, tongues out, hissing, and ready to strike. On the recto, in place of an epigraph, are two definitions of the verb petrify,the first figurative and the second literal. The effect is eerie, and the reader might expect the story to focus immediately on this Medusa, but it does not.The book starts, instead, with Jack, considering his “fleshy handiwork” (p. 2), and then follows the book’s protagonist Tabitha, who has left upstate New York to chase “the fire of the Spirit” to the city, hoping to do good works with the Salvation Army (p. 3). Along with her fellow transplant and Salvation Army worker Pearl, Tabitha comes to realize that many of the other girls who have come to the city have been trafficked and are prisoners in brothels. Tabitha and Pearl launch a project to rescue one of these girls, but suddenly in the midst of their adventure, Pearl falls ill, and when she arises, she has snakes as hair and the ability to petrify.13
In the meantime, Jack has sailed to New York, fleeing the London police who suspect that he is—did you guess?—Jack the Ripper. When a chambermaid who turns out to be a Gorgon (one of many such anonymous women who pass briefly through the book) stuns him, his thoughts approach an understanding: “Gorgons of legend could turn you to stone. Gorgons today aren’t what they used to be” (114). Jack is unaware that the actual change is that men like him—not Athena – create Medusas. Passing by Pearl in New York City, they make some accidental contact, and this contact triggers her metamorphosis.
Like the other Medusas, Pearl is unaware of what has happened to her. Medusa’s voice speaks from her body: “We are Pearl, and we are Medusa….We will find…the men who slay and wound us without pity” (p. 127). When Pearl does returns to her senses, she feels a bodily desire to find Jack and kill him. She does not know who he is or what he has done. She does not know his name or how he looks. But she knows exactly where he is. She can smell him. Pearl, however, is a devout Christian. She tries to resist her desire, reject the underlying paganism, and return to her Salvation Army mission, but she cannot overpower her Medusa urge.
Throughout this book, gestures are made to the Perseus story, but it is clear that the characters have only minimal knowledge of classical mythology. (This, too, differentiates the novel from many reception pieces for young readers, in which characters are as excited about mythology as the readers.) Passing by the Bowery dime museum, Tabitha sees an advertisement for “Giselle the Gorgon of Gotham” and her reaction displays her disconnection from mythology: “Gorgon…had something to do with Medusa. Was that what had killed her in the myths?” (p. 135). Seeing a pair of giants, she reflects that they “looked like paintings of Atlas, holding up the sky” (p. 139). Tabitha, like viewers of contemporary Medusa images, understands mythology through iconography, not narrative. The freedom that this visual engagement with mythology engenders allows for the story to take its own form, unbound by received tradition.
The girls’ quest provides the reader a colorful adventure through late nineteenth century New York City, but, just like the elided Medusa narrative, this novel is ultimately a story about the mistreatment of women and girls. Pearl, like Dusie, after initial resistance, finds a way to integrate monstrosity with compassion, incorporating Christianity into her Medusa-fueled quests. She and Tabitha, identifying themselves as “Slum Sisters” of the Salvation Army, offer women help in their homes: with their chores, with their children, and with their husbands. When it becomes apparent that a man has been violent with his family, Pearl uses her powers in a non-lethal, but convincing manner to eradicate that behavior. (The less gentle eradication of Jack’s behavior happens at the hands of one of the anonymous Medusas, and, like a good tragedy, offstage.) In the end, this Medusa story keeps our Medusa alive, and it makes her a fighter for justice through nonviolence: Pearl lifts women up as she suppresses evil. This conclusion lays out a revision sorely needed in our times: a roadmap for transforming violence into compassion and a model to prevent readers angry at injustice from creating further injustice.
This summer everyone seems to be talking about adaptation. The way these three novelists adapt the story of Medusa takes her in entirely different directions, yet a common thread connects all three. In their resistance to the ancient story of violence and monstrosity, all three authors weave tales of compassion. Mary Beard has recently commented on the peculiarity of assuming that classicists affirm the values of antiquity, contrasting that assumption with the understanding that virologists do not support the goals of viruses, for example.14 Beard’s point is that we can find antiquity interesting and productive without endorsing its messages. These three novelists do precisely this: they reject the traditional framing and create adaptations that support young readers in accepting themselves, understanding their world, and taking what steps they can to address its imperfections. Their novels reconfigure the old stories for our times, and by revising them, preserve them for us to continue the process of modifying in ways both foreseen and unforeseen.
Notes
- “MWTH – Artist-Led Project & Iconographic Representations,” MWTH Project, accessed July 27, 2026 and Julia Jacobs, “How a Medusa Sculpture From a Decade Ago Became #MeToo Art,” The New York Times, October 13, 2020. ↩︎
- danpiraro (@danpiraro), Instagram, among others. ↩︎
- David Leeming, Medusa: In the Mirror of Time (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). ↩︎
- Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief (New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2005), 185. ↩︎
- Natalie Haynes, Stone Blind (New York: HarperCollins, 2023). ↩︎
- Ayana Gray, I, Medusa (New York: Random House, 2025). ↩︎
- Joan Holub, Brush Your Hair, Medusa! Mini Myths (New York: Abrams, 2015). ↩︎
- Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams, Medusa the Mean (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012). ↩︎
- Sajni Patel, A Drop of Venom (New York: Hyperion, 2024). ↩︎
- Marianne Govers Hopman, Scylla: Myth, Metaphor, Paradox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 259. ↩︎
- Manvir Singh, “How Monsters Went from Menacing to Misunderstood,” A Critic at Large, The New Yorker, November 3, 2025, 58. ↩︎
- Elise Earthman, “Instructions for Survival–or Plans for Disaster? Young Adult Novels with Mythological Themes,” in He Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text, ed. Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar (Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 161-175. ↩︎
- An interesting detail: Pearl, like both Dusa and Dusie, is fatherless. Unlike the other two, however, Pearl remembers and mourns for her dead father. ↩︎
- Mary Beard, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2026). ↩︎
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