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Elektra: No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller from the Author of ARIADNE

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Cassandra arguably doesn’t belong in this story, but you can’t argue that her part isn’t interesting. I wanted no Trojan soldier to take what was mine; no glory-seeking warrior to seize his chance of fame by plunging his sword into Agamemnon’s heart Let him come back, I hissed into the empty sky. The relationship between mother and daughter is very fraught and obviously does not end well for either of them. It might be different if, for instance, Saint had swapped Elektra for someone farther removed from Clytemnestra so that it felt like three women coming from three vastly different places rather than leaving Cassandra as such an outlier. We all know the story, the curse of House of Atreus, fratricide, sacrificing daughter; a long war that began in the name of only one woman; and the prophecy for the seventh child of Queen Hecabe.

After thirteen years as a high school English teacher, she wrote ARIADNE which tells the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur from the perspective of Ariadne - the woman who made it happen. However, I loved the portrayal and depth of Agamemnon’s character in the book – not likeable but it was great to see more depth and colour to this very powerful character in Greek mythology. Now I recognize that I don't have to like any of the characters for the book to be good, and that some characters are written with the intention of being unlikable. Saint really puts her own style and voice to these myths in a way that very few have successfully accomplished, and you really are able to fully comprehend all that has happened to the ladies, and just what mindset and reasoning you would have to kill your own mother and whether or not it was morally right to do so. They plan and seethe and clash emotionally, but for most of the novel they just sit around because no action can take place with the menfolk absent.Cassandra is a princess of Troy and priestess to Apollo, cursed to see the future and never be believed. If the whole book had been as powerful as Clytemnestra’s sections, I likely would have been satisfied. All the action takes place elsewhere, and all we have to go on here is a tragedy before papa goes off to lead the army of the Greeks, the tragedy caused by the same jerk, and we're pretty much stuck in the heads of those who were left behind. What a great read, I hardly can express my feeling, the story goes on magical, beautiful and fascinating. She chooses not to see things from Clytemnestra’s POV where her father, Agamemnon (Clytemnestra’s husband) purposely murders and sacrifices Iphigenia for a wind to take the army to Troy.

An exciting, lyrical new retelling of the trojan war stories from Jennifer Saint, the bestselling author of ELEKTRA (UK, Sunday Times , May 2022) and ARIADNE (UK, Sunday Times , April 2021).Especially considering that this was a (feminist) retelling, it was aggravating to read that the girl first didn't acknowledge that her mother was using a man / boy to get revenge for Agamemnon's crime (as if only men could do that), while making excuses for her father despite him having killed her older sister, only to then turn on her mother for not seeing that everyone must be doing everything to please the gods (effectively not caring about her supposedly beloved sister) and plotting to murder Clytemnestra to avenge Agamemnon. Maybe this was originally a short(er) story but the publisher wanted a higher page count from the author after her previous success. Her drowning, never-ending grief was portrayed so well, her fierce love for her children felt so tangible that it felt like *I* lost people beloved to me as well. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Nevertheless, I wanted to read this if only for my love of mythology and I am glad that I did despite this not being as good as the author's previous book.

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