A Thousand Ships

This one hooked me from the first words: “Sing, Muse.”

I always enjoy the wit Haynes brings to her work. And I love how this book pulls the reader into so many different points of view, creating a sweeping narrative. The craft of this one left me a bit stunned.

Plus, war is so often told as a man’s adventure. Here, Haynes shows the cost to women who are abandoned, enslaved, and widowed. As retellings go, this is a unique and clever reimagining. 

A Thousand Ships is a mythological reimagining not from the POV of conquerors of Troy but from the POV of the kidnapped, the enslaved, and the abused. In short, women. And of course, the goddesses who started it all.

It is an exploration of the voice of women in Greek Mythos who have so far just worked as plot devices in the OG story but are now given emotions and motivations. To see, the two sides of the war from Hecuba (Queen of Troy) and Clytemnestra (wife of Agamemnon)’s POV broadened my horizon of Troy from the battlefield to their… show more.

A Thousand Ships is a powerful and entertaining retelling of the Iliad and the Odyssey, focusing mainly on the Trojan War.

Told for the first time from the women’s perspective, it is a moving and insightful account of war and its aftermath. I laughed at the Judgment of Paris. I cried at Andromache's loss. I loved Penelope's increasingly frustrated tone in her letters to her wandering husband, Odysseus. Witty and poignant, brilliant and insightful, this book is a modern classic.

Natalie Haynes makes a wonderful job of bringing the heroic women (and goddesses) of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece to life, as never before.

Ironically, Helen of Troy herself, the fabulous stolen beauty at the centre of a catastrophic war in ancient Asia Minor, hardly gets a mention. She seems to exist only as an excuse for slaughter, and I found Haynes' view of this legendary beauty grimly convincing.

The other women (and goddesses) involved―raped, kidnapped, robbed of their children, and yet undaunted; given voices by the poet called Homer, more or less ignored by every scholar since, are all… show more.

Here are the voices of the women caught in the endless war at Troy. So many women would be separated from husbands and sons; others mourn for lost loved ones. Some would be sacrificed, such as Iphigenia and Polyxena, many more (such as Hector’s wife Andromache) would be taken to new lives of slavery in foreign lands, and some (like Priam’s wife Hecabe) would prefer death to enslavement. To listen to these women is to know the violent ruin of war. The voice of Penelope, a survivor but nonetheless wounded, is especially poignant as she recounts her feelings about exploits… show more.

Chapter Thirty-Five. The whole of this book is fascinating—the way it is linear according to the story of each character it focuses on (the women caught up in the Trojan War, primarily) rather than trying to tell us the story linearly of the war itself was a stroke of literary genius as a means by which to piece together the mess of the war without struggling to balance the multitude of character perspectives that would have existed simultaneously in any one moment. But Chapter Thirty-Five, that glimpse of the muse Calliope and her perspective on the events being recorded by… show more.

Haynes’ novel is the most distinctly “feminist” on my list, an approach I find innately compelling. Rather than restoring a voice to one woman in-depth (as I did with Briseis), hers is “the story of all of them.” How does Haynes pull this off? One way is via a dark, dry humor – unexpected but deeply engaging. Another is her speedy deftness as she depicts the emotional resonance of each woman’s specific circumstances. Haynes honors their wildly differing voices and experiences within the larger backdrop of the Trojan War. As readers we care about each of them—magic!