Elektra: The mesmerising story of Troy from the three women its heart

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Her storyline feels one-dimensional, with her only trait being her obsession with her father and how great he is. Clytemnestra, Cassandra and Elektra are the women bearing the brunt of a war created by men and gods, seemingly over Helen of Troy but also because they thrive on it.

I really enjoyed Jennifer Saint's previous book, Ariade, and was excited to get a chance to read Elektra! More than anything else, reading Elektra made me want to revisit Madeline Miller’s superior The Song of Achilles, because those little moments wherein the women hear about the war stories only made me think , that’s the story I really want to be reading. We witness Clytemnestra’s journey to Mycenae, the birth of their children… and of course the start of the Trojan war, as well as many more events that take place. I loved reading through Cassandra’s chapters as I do have a slight bias towards her (hi, hello, I’m an Apollo lover) but I think some of my favourite parts to read were Clytemnestra’s interactions with her sister Helen, yes that Helen.This could have been stronger had it been a more in depth story focusing solely on Clytemnestra or Cassandra but the three POV’s made the story weaker and more surface level. It’s true that these stories almost always focus on men, with the women playing side roles at best, even when they do enough to warrant helming their own stories. interest was also mainly in the second half of the book, and completely absorbed me at the end with a more than satisfying ending as the characters wrestle with their moral dilemma and thirst for revenge because that was what tradition dictated.

The story has been tackled by many tragedians such as Aeschylus and Euripides and I was so delighted with Saint’s handlings of the complex themes of the story. As it happened, I read this shortly after reading Clare Heywood's excellent Daughters of Sparta, which tells much the same story, albeit in a different manner. felt there wasn’t enough new material built into the story, so it felt like a ‘telling’ rather than ‘retelling’ of a story I was already very familiar with. She is also the wife of Agamemnon the king who leads this massive siege of Troy to retrieve Helen, the wife of his brother, Menelaus. Elektra' is a beautiful, haunting, twisted, and fascinating Greek retelling, inextricably bound to tragedy, mystery, intrigue, and retribution.The story telling flows and the author did really well to breathe life into centuries old myths and legends that makes the reader really connected with the story.

If the whole book had been as powerful as Clytemnestra’s sections, I likely would have been satisfied. Saint creates a sense of complete and utter dread that builds and builds until the truth is revealed. I can’t quite tell if the intended audience is people who are just getting into mythology or people who already know it well. Her fixation and devotion to the idea of a man that clearly did not exist, I could never understand. However, instead of focusing on the male heroes who usually helm such tales, Saint instead tells the story through the lens of three women: Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra, their daughter Elektra, and Apollo’s cursed prophetess Cassandra.And then we have some of the OTHER more memorable female characters from across Greece, on the other side of the war, to give a counterpoint, but it's weird and hardly necessary at all except to bring in the action that has been so missing from the primary tale. It might be different if, for instance, Saint had swapped Elektra for someone farther removed from Clytemnestra so that it felt like three women coming from three vastly different places rather than leaving Cassandra as such an outlier.