Recycling classical myths is a well-worn literary trope; everyone from Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood and Rick Riordan have riffed on and remixed Greek and Roman stories. Ms. Miller, 39, who lives outside Philadelphia, is particularly well equipped to tackle Homer. She began studying Latin when she was 12, started on Greek a couple of years later, and seems to have near encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Western gods and goddesses.

“Circe” — a feminist reboot starring a goddess who has often been overlooked, or miscast as a vindictive seductress — has drawn praise both from classics scholars and novelists like Margaret George and Ann Patchett.

Emily Wilson, a classicist who recently published a new translation of the Odyssey, said she was skeptical at first of yet another “retelling of a classical myth,” but was won over by Ms. Miller’s take. “What she’s doing is partly about gender, but it’s also addressing a bigger question about power, and the abuse of power,” she said.

In Ms. Miller’s version, Circe’s encounter with Odysseus is only a slice of her story, which unfolds over thousands of years and begins in the palace of her father, the sun god Helios. Her family members, who treat her with cruelty or indifference, become infamous in their own right: Her sister Pasiphae marries King Minos and gives birth to the Minotaur, a bullheaded, man-eating monster; while her brother Aeetes grows up to rule Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece, and fathers Medea, who later murders her children.

Circe’s fortune changes when she discovers her power to transform. After she turns a nymph, Scylla, into a six-headed sea monster, Helios banishes Circe to a remote island where she spends centuries in exile, with wolves and lions as her companions.

Ms. Miller was intrigued by Homer’s description of Circe as ”speaking like a human,” an odd detail that is never fully explained in the Odyssey. In her novel, Circe’s deceptively soft voice produces grave consequences. When sailors wash up on her island, she welcomes them with wine and food, and they mistake her for a mortal. After a violent encounter with one sailor, she begins preemptively attacking them, turning them into pigs.

To flesh out Circe’s story, Ms. Miller looked beyond the Odyssey and consulted a handful of ancient texts. She found scattered references to Circe across the ancient world, and drew from the plot of the Telegony, an epic preserved only in a short summary, which tells the story of Telegonus, Odysseus and Circe’s son.