4.5! Wow. This was good.
**
“I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough.”

I really enjoyed this! It’s been sitting on my shelf for AGESSS because when I got it I was a little Greek-myth’d out (shocking, I know) and I haven’t gotten around to picking it up until now. But wow! It’s gotten me right back into the Greek myth swing of things and now that’s all I want to read.

I went back and forth on whether I liked the narrative layout of this (it skips around a looooot), but overall I enjoyed it. I could never tell where we were gonna go next and I think that worked in my favor, because I’ve read soo many books detailing the Trojan War that it gets a bit redundant. But this book just really shined by having it completely narrated by the women, most of which have very little presence in the popular texts. It’s similar to The Silence of the Girls (which I coincidentally got at the exact same time that I received this book) but this one brings the focus out to many different women, stories and myths (unlike TSOTG which is mostly reserved for events surrounding Briseis/Achilles). It was thrilling.

Myths I know so completely just had a whole new life breathed into them that I very much loved. Little nods towards major myth plot points we know but with a new spin were so fun. The recurring characters were compelling— Cassandra was amazing in this and I also liked Andromache’s and Hecabe’s narrations quite a bit. I especially loved the chapters narrated by Calliope, which I thought were funny, entertaining and a clever way to really drive the book’s central point home. I felt the book meandered a teeny bit in the middle, but the end was really strong and I loved the last few chapters, including the information in the author’s note. I am excited to check out more work by Haynes in the future!