A Thousand Ships: A Novel (2019 original; edició 2021)

I read about a third of this and it just got more and more boring. The characters are all modern people. There is no feeling of being in a different culture. ( )

I could not put this down. I loved Circe and Silence of the Girls and this is right up there with them. If you love Greek mythology, especially ones focused on the women - then look no further. A Thousand Ships isn't about Achilles and Odysseus - it's about the unsung heroes - the women. From Cassandra to Hecabe to hated Helen of Troy - A Thousand Ships weaves together all of the women's stories. More times than not - they are horrible, and suffer time and again. But they will not be forgotten. All of the untold and unheralded stories, pushed aside in favor of the big brutish warriors and kings but hidden no longer. Compelling, heartfelt, and one I will CERTAINLY come back to time and again. Wonderfully written. ( )

This retelling of the Trojan War centres the women in the story, both mortal and immortal: Penelope, Creusa, Clytemnestra, Cassandra, Thetis, Eris… and holding the threads together is Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry. I really enjoyed seeing how the stories were reframed by shifting the narrator from one of the men to one of the women. There were rather a lot of people to keep track of, so you may need to be a little bit familiar with the traditional retelling. But I would definitely recommend this book if you like retellings with a feminist perspective, or war stories that focus on those left behind or sidelined. ( )

If you loved the Trojan War novels Circe and Song of Achilles, if you are a connoisseur of Greek myths - here's your next must-read. I fell in love with The Iliad in junior high (thanks forever, Miss Liegy!) but never imagined that the entire world of Greek mythology would continue to grow as I grew up. This historical novel, so wry and humorous with its modern take on the imagined lives of the ancients, gets under the skin of the epics of Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and others, to finally allow the women to tell their own tales. There's scarcely one who lived through the Trojan War who is left out (Circe had her own novel) - the major figures of Clytemnestra, Penelope, Hecuba, Helen, Cassandra, and Andromache, and the minor ones - Iphigeneia, the Amazon Penthesilea, Briseis and Chryseis, Laodamia, and Polyxena – are all given their voices back. And then there's the deities - the biggies Gaia, Athena, Aphrodite, Hera, and the Furies, and the minor goddesses, nymphs and girlfriends of Zeus - Thetis, Themis, Oenone, Eris, and Homer's muse, Calliope, who gets pretty fed up with him. There's a remarkable passage where Mother Earth, Gaia, complains to Zeus that the earth is overpopulated, and they strategize together about the easiest way to bring about a reduction of humans - hello, Helen of Troy! And Penelope's unsent letters to her wandering husband Odysseus, indicating her displeasure at his wanderings could be a comic novel onto themselves ("One excuse after another. You met a monster. You met a witch. Cannibals broke your ships. A whirlpool ate your friends.") The author is a heroic classicist who brings true immortality to those previously given short shrift.

Quotes: "Every man looked out for himself first and his men second, and the other Greeks after that, if at all. Merit was decided by what a man had, not by what he did."

"What could a god find to talk about with the old gods like the three Seasons, the weather?" ( )

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