Aug 14

Aug 14 The Women of Troy (Women of Troy, #2)

Author: Pat Barker
Publisher: Doubleday
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Following her bestselling, critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths.

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...

TL;DR Review

Those who loved The Silence of the Girls will love The Women of Troy, its sequel. It offers a powerful look, through the eyes of Briseis, into the aftermath of Troy’s defeat and what it meant for the Trojan women who became slaves.

For you if: You like feminist Greek mythology retellings. I recommend reading The Silence of the Girls first!

Full Review

First, thank you Doubleday for the gifted finished copy! I loved The Silence of the Girls, its predecessor, and had a feeling this one would also be for me. I was right. The Women of Troy is gutting, thought-provoking, and intelligently, beautifully written. If you love Greek mythology retellings, this one’s got your name written all over it.

The Women of Troy picks up where The Silence of the Girls ended, picking up Briseis’s story at the end of the Trojan war. Briseis, who was Achilles’s bed slave while he was alive, is now carrying his child and married to one of his former counselors. We also get a few chapters from the perspective of Pyrrhus, Achille’s son, who is grappling (and cracking) with the enormous pressure of upholding a legacy.

Two big things shined for me in this story. First, the way Barker continues to give enslaved women voices, showing the unimaginable things they were expected to just absorb and live with; to go from being Trojan royalty, mothers, daughters — to bed slaves of the men who murdered everyone they loved. We already saw Briseis go through that in The Silence of the Girls, and it’s fascinating (and devastating) to see her attempt to coach her friends through it while also attempting to still protect herself and grapple with the distance her privileged position wedges between them, between her very identity as a Trojan. The gulf widens even as she grasps at it.

The second thing was Pyrrhus’s spiral. Before I read this book, I brushed up on him, and I ended up reading a two-part blog series from Madeline Miller. She says there are two famous depictions of him: the first, and most well known, is Vergil’s portrait in the Aneid of a narcissistic psychopath. The second is from Sophocles’ Philoctetes, which shows him as a child attempting to do right by his father. In this book, Pat Barker seems to have merged these two versions, showing a boy cracking and breaking under the weight of his father’s legacy.

And throughout, of course, we have Pat Barker’s beautiful prose. Read The Silence of the Girls, if you haven’t yet, and then read this!