Way back in the day, the ancient Greeks understood Alcestis as, quite literally, the perfect wife: In the story, when the time comes for her husband to die, she offers to go in his place. Three days later, Herakles travels to the Underworld and wrestles Death to bring her home. She has a kid or two, and that’s basically all those ancient Greeks got to hear from Alcestis.

Luckily for us, we get to hear a lot more about Alcestis, thanks to Katharine Beutner and her debut novel, Alcestis. Beutner is like a god, taking the stick figure the Greeks gave her and turning it into a flesh-and-blood woman, one who not only loves but also hates and fears and grieves. We see Alcestis’s childhood and adolescence, the fear she feels for her father and the love she has for her sister. We see her courted by and subsequently married to Admetus, a man who adores his wife but loves the god Apollo. But most exciting, we see her in the Underworld, falling into a volatile, love-hate relationship with its queen, Persephone, and an even more complicated relationship with its king, Hades.

But Alcestis isn’t really the star here. The star is Beutner herself. After all, it is she, not Alcestis, who brings Alcestis to life. It is through her luscious, almost hedonistic writing that Alcestis, the Greek landscape, and its mythology come alive. The prose is physical, grounded in observable reality, but the descriptions never drag or drown or suffocate. The book acts like a verbal teleportation device, because the details are so effortlessly pulled and beautifully drawn that it’s almost impossible not to see and feel and taste Greece, from the celebratory feasts to the parched air to the touch of a sister or a lover.

But it is not writing alone that makes Alcestis stand out; it’s also the world Beutner creates, a world so real that it’s hard to believe Beutner didn’t live it herself. Sometimes we forget that what we call ‘mythology’ was religion for the Greeks. It’s hard for us to shake the images of mythology popularized by modern culture (I’m looking at you, Disney’s Hercules), but Beutner’s integration and normalization of mythology into the narrative here is spectacular. She does this mostly through Alcestis’s voice. If she feels a breeze, she makes an aside about the local wind god. If the waves rush up the beach and splash her, it’s Poseidon’s blessing. To explain her grief after her sister’s death, Alcestis invokes (and retcons) the Narcissus myth.

Of course, Beutner doesn’t stop with religion. She integrates virtually every facet of life in Greece, from the dress to the cuisine to the treatment of women, into the story, and she refuses to shy away or judge any of it. It is so easy to think a retelling of the Alcestis myth will be an indictment of the horrible way the Greeks treated their women, and Beutner certainly brings that to light here. Her Alcestis is subversive and revolutionary and liberating. But Beutner never accuses or judges the culture itself, never raises Alcestis into some paradigm that all women should follow. Her Alcestis never stands on a soapbox. Beutner earned an undergraduate degree in classical studies, and I think it is her deep respect for the culture that prevents her from trying to change it. It is that same respect, I think, combined with a sensational wordsmithing talent and a teleportational imagination, that enabled her to write Alcestis as a debut novel. Personally, I can’t imagine what she’ll do next, but I have a feeling she can.