I listened to this on audio, read by the author herself. If you have not been inundated by feminist retellings of Greek history, I am quite confident you will have better luck with A Thousand Ships.

With so many of the same characters, I found myself thinking things like, That’s not how Briseis would act! simply because Haynes saw a character differently than how Barker wrote her. It was impossible not to compare this book to The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker and it was impossible for the book not to suffer in comparison in my mind. There’s nothing I really disliked about it (though I felt like Penelope’s sections – written as letters to Odysseus – felt out of place with the rest of the story), I simply realized after it began that I’m oversaturated by re-tellings of Greek myths. With all that, I don’t have much more to offer than faint praise for this book. Women heartbroken and women glad to be rid of their men. There is a terrific variety of both voice and perspective. Haynes’ research is clearly both deep and wide. But we also see the wives left behind in other kingdoms, the daughters cloistered in Troy for ten long years.

Much of what we see is what takes place after the fall of Troy – there is a focus on the group of Trojan women who are taken prisoner by the Greeks after the men of their city are slaughtered. We hear from Penelope, Clytemnestra, Aphrodite, and even the muse Calliope. Through a wide variety of voices, Natalie Haynes retells the story of the Trojan War, focusing on the many women who were involved.

Book review a thousand ships