This manages to recontextualize events and choices in terms of family relationships, motherhood, and trauma.

While I enjoyed Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, which I thought was an impressive debut, I found Elektra to be a more powerful and absorbing novel.She then spends the next 10 years planning to murder her husband when he comes home from Mycenae and see her trying to hold power in court. Her fixation and devotion to the idea of a man that clearly did not exist, I could never understand. After the battle of Troy, Agamemnon (who let’s face it, we all dislike very much) claims her as his war prize and takes her back to Mycenae like the absolute dick he is. The complicated mother-daughter relationship between Clytemnestra and Elektra, each obsessed with their respective quest for revenge, was brilliantly penned. I don't want to say boring because I love the story of Troy and all these people involved in it, but here we are.

I’ve heard the most about The Women of Troy, but she’s written The Silence of the Girls as well, which is about Briseis (the woman that Agamemnon and Achilles squabble over). The writing flowed well, and there was no choppiness when Saint switched from one POV to another, though the most compelling chapters for me were the ones told by Clytemnestra.The women who are left behind are literally left behind the biggest, most exciting battle of Greek antiquity. Her chapters, while the events themselves are highly compelling, the way she tells them is just dull. I would feel so incredibly sad for Clytemnestra and then several pages later so frustrated with her. Whenever I'm in a reading slump and I need something to shake me out of my funk, Greek mythology is what I reach for. This book starts us off with before the Trojan war; Helen is in Sparta looking for a suitor and men from all over Greece have heard of her beauty and want her for a wife… apart from Agamemnon who meets Clytemnestra (and Odysseus, who finds interest in Penelope, Helens cousin).