I was provided The Women of Troy by Pat Barker as an ARC through NetGalley in return for an honest review. All opinions are my own and thanks is extended to the author, publishers and NetGalley for allowing me to do so.
Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home victors, loaded with their spoils: their stolen gold, stolen weapons, stolen women. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails.
But the wind does not come. The gods have been offended – the body of Priam lies desecrated, unburied – and so the victors remain in limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, pacing at the edge of an unobliging sea. And, in these empty, restless days, the hierarchies that held them together begin to fray, old feuds resurface and new suspicions fester.
Largely unnoticed by her squabbling captors, Briseis remains in the Greek encampment. She forges alliances where she can – with young, dangerously naïve Amina, with defiant, aged Hecuba, with Calchus, the disgraced priest – and begins to see the path to a kind of revenge. Briseis has survived the Trojan War, but peacetime may turn out to be even more dangerous…
I thought The Women of Troy was good. It’s perhaps not quite as brilliant as its predecessor, The Silence of The Girls, but Pat Barker has produced another well told, humane and completely real story here as she continues the retelling of the fall of Troy and its aftermath through the eyes of Briseis, once Achilles’ Prize of Honour and who is now married to Achilles’ friend.
The events here are documented in many texts such as the Aeneid, the Iliad and so forth however Barker has an ability to convey the experienced that her characters are feeling, going through and so on in a special way as well as building up atmosphere and allowing the reader to feel like they are there in the thick of the setting and the storyline which could still be relevant in today’s society.
Maybe because the story is so well known I didn’t find it impacted me as much as some of her other novels and so it is a 3 star read for me.
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