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Posted 20 hours ago

Ithaca

£9.9£99Clearance
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It's awfully confusing, not to me personally because I know the Ithacan setting of the Odyssey very well so I know what is going on, but not every reader will, so this writing is likely to be discouraging. It’s told in an omnipresent third present (with first person for Hera’s take on things) which lend the book a bit of a literary feel.

North does a fantastic job of showing just how precarious Penelope’s position is, in a world where women are seen as second class citizens, Penelope risks not only her own life, but that of her people by refusing to choose a new husband to rule Ithaca. Keeping one's own son, self, and people alive - now that's going to take a much wilier person than Odysseus.We know the story of the suitors and how Odysseus tricked and defeated them, but Penelope’s entire experience is often glazed over. There are moments when she is scathing in her critique of men and disdain for the ancient poets, and moments where she is softer in the fondness she feels for her queens. Penelope is left to fend for herself and her son and run the kingdom of Ithaca with help of her household of maids and advisors.

Like Penelope at her loom North both weaves and unweaves, teasing out the threads of Homeric myth to recombine them into something unique, wonderful and urgently contemporary - M.Interestingly, I'd read a lot more about Clytemnestra and Elektra in other recent retellings, and I now got watch their lives unfold from a different perspective. It's Hera, who looks down on Penelope, encouraging her along and rooting for her in times of difficulty. Athena loves it when a hunky warrior clad in bronze kneels before her inner sanctum, and when a man violated a woman upon her altar, it was the woman whose hair she turned to snakes in retribution for this sacrilege.

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