Review by Booklist Review
Barker returns with the third in series reimagining the mythos of Greek epics from the women's point-of-view. The story picks up with death-obsessed Cassandra and her reluctant servant, Ritsa, journeying to Mycenae as spoils of war. Agamemnon's victory has come at a terrible cost, for Trojan and Mycenaean alike. Troy is utterly destroyed, its men dead and women enslaved. Mycenae has lost its share of men, with those left suffering to fund a decade-long conflict--only to put "that whore Helen" right back where she started. Clytemnestra, Helen's "plain" sister, has a special welcome in store for her husband Agamemnon, who sacrificed their daughter to the gods in exchange for a fair wind for his warships. The prose, conversational in tone, melds the sophisticated and vulgar, using anachronism and modern dialogue to illuminate the personalities involved. There is an almost gothic element to the setting, a dark, decaying palace haunted by murdered children and generational blood debts. With this novel, Barker again proves adept at offering an absorbing take on familiar material through perspective shift.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Barker (The Silence of the Girls) recounts the aftermath of the Trojan War in this tense third entry in her Women of Troy series. With the city in ruins, victorious King Agamemnon and his Greek army sail home to Mycenae. On the ship, King Priam's daughter Cassandra, once a virgin priestess and now a concubine, endures Agamemnon's abuse. Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophesy but made sure no one would believe her. Now, on approach to Agamemnon's royal palace, she foresees two dead bodies in the courtyard: hers and the king's. Agamemnon also has a troubled mind--he sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, to assure victory at Troy, and now he sees her ghost on the ship. Meanwhile, at the palace, Queen Clytemnestra plots to murder Agamemnon for killing Iphigenia. But the queen has her own enemies--her son Orestes and daughter Electra. The narrator, Ritsa, is another beleaguered woman. A Trojan survivor enslaved by Cassandra, she's resigned to a life of subjugation. Barker suffuses the wrenching narrative with the women's simmering contempt for the men who rule their world. Readers will relish this fierce feminist retelling. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Dec.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The third volume in Barker's Trojan War series moves to Mycenae for a bloody climax. Briseis, the enslaved Trojan princess who narrated the fall of Troy and ensuing wait for the Greeks to sail home inThe Silence of the Girls (2018) andThe Women of Troy (2021), is replaced here by Ritsa, a fellow Trojan who was her close friend. Ritsa is charged with babysitting Cassandra, daughter of the fallen King Priam, who is now enslaved to victorious Greek commander Agamemnon and proclaims that they will be killed in Mycenae. Indeed, readers soon meet Clytemnestra--in close third-person chapters alternating with Ritsa's slave's-eye first person--who is plotting to revenge herself on Agamemnon for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. But Ritsa's master, Machaon, dismisses this idea: "Frightened? Of hiswife?...She'll jump if he tells her to." Ritsa, as punchy a narrator as Briseis, voices the feminist critique central to all three novels in response. "Pure reflex that, an automatic assertion of the rights of men." Barker's use of blunt British vernacular to revive this ancient Greek tale remains as effective as ever. Her latest volume adds a new note to its predecessors' grim catalogues of brutalities. It's decidedly creepy; the palace rustles with the voices of invisible children who leave handprints and footprints that keep reappearing no matter how often they're scrubbed off. They are the children Agamemnon's father, Atreus, murdered and served in a pie to their father, his brother. But they are also "all the other little boys hurled to their deaths, the babies tossed into the air and caught on spears while their mothers were made to watch" as the victorious Greeks overran fallen Troy. Barker's vision of a world shaped by violence, a key theme in all her fiction, is equal to the tragic grandeur of ancient myth, and her insistence that ordinary people's sufferings be given equal weight with the woes of the mighty gives it a contemporary edge. More brilliant work from one of world literature's greatest writers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
