Since the last time, I’ve been reading this on and off – skipping around chapters – reading this alongside other books. I borrowed this so many times from the library that I got my own copy.

This does not follow the story of one person, several times Natalie Haynes says that this is the story of many women. I counted 25. These are mortals and supernatural beings. Their stories, over 43 chapters, retell parts of The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and various plays by Aeschylus and Euripides like its one story.

Spoiler

Creusa is finally given a voice as she recounts recent events. The city of Troy is burning around her and she is trying to make sense of it. I found her faith of her husband, Aeneas, come for her chilling.

Chryseis’s adventurous, rebellious streak that gets her captured by the Greeks. Later, when her father comes to get her back from the Greeks, she views him in a new way. It’s an understated moment that shows (without big highlights) how she has had to grow up whilst being a prisoner of the Greeks. It’s a nice moment.

Helen, not apologising for the war (later it’s shown she wasn’t the cause of it). Helen also puts Odysseus in his place, stands up to Hecube’s anger whilst sympathising with her and the other women of Troy.

How Hecabe changed towards her daughter Cassandra after Apollo cursed her. Since then, Cassandra has been an embarrassment to Hecabe with her constant babbling. There’s a passing moment, the kind that’s easy to miss, that shows Hecabe’s conflict as a mother to love her daughter unconditionally, which she clearly does but finds it hard to show it.

Penelope, is less angry than Margaret Atwood’s Penelope in The Penelopiad, but is clear-sighted about Odysseus’s adventures. Penelope asks “who is it that has returned?” wondering if the war has changed Odysseus for the worse.

These and the other stories interconnect with each other, never losing sight of the main theme – the women.

I also like how the story is told out of sequence, it starts with the fall of Troy, where the Judgement of Paris comes later.

There’s a lot here that makes a good springboard for me to keep coming back and reading again.

So, it’s nice to now have my own copy that I don’t have to give back :)