All of this brutality was for men’s satisfaction, for their desire to see a too-beautiful woman humiliated and for the riches and women they could plunder. But it was not them who burned a city to the ground, slaughtered the sons and husbands and brothers lying dead on Troy’s beaches, and kidnapped the women into slavery, scattering them across the sea. Helen and Clytemnestra are particularly villainized in the mythological canon, these two sisters who reputedly did such terrible things to advance their own station in life. Women in Greek mythology are usually at best forgotten, at worst abhorred. All these women and more, many more, who pick up the pieces and do their best for one another, who grieve with each other even across enemy lines, who have none of the say and yet bear most of the burden.

Instead, she focuses on the women: Clytemnestra, whose husband sacrifices their daughter for a fair wind in his sails, who runs a country in his absence and plots vengeance for her daughter Helen, on whom this whole war is blamed, who knows that the Greeks are fighting for notoriety and wealth far more than for her Cassandra, who sees what is coming and tries in vain for years to get anyone to listen, who ultimately pays more for this pointless war than any of the men. So Saint ignores the men and their bloodshed, their petty infighting and the triumphs that bolster their bloated pride. But there is a hidden side to wars like this, wars fought only to protect the egos of kings: the barbaric cruelty of it all, made all the worse by its futility.

War is often told through stories of the men’s battlefield - the exhaustion of fighting, the grief of watching your brothers-in-arms be struck down and the glory of a hard-won victory. In this tale, that is Clytemnestra, married to Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae and leader of the Greek army Elektra, her daughter and Cassandra, a Trojan princess blessed with visions from Apollo but cursed to be forever disbelieved.

(To explain the myth would be to spoil the book, so read the linked article at your own discretion.)Īs has become a defining feature of the genre, the focus of “Elektra” is not on the classic heroes and villains - Agamemnon, Paris, Odysseus and the other combative men - but on the women they love, betray and abandon. Jennifer Saint, author of a well-received retelling of the myth of Ariadne, returns with an even more ambitious retelling: the Trojan War.

Over the past decade, modern retellings of myths have exploded in popularity, becoming a staple of both young adult and adult fiction.

Ariadne by jennifer saint summary