Ithaca

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Having Hera as our narrator brings in the other God’s and she shows just how fickle and unworthy of worship they truly are. It was impossible to connect to any of the characters, which led to a lack of connection to the book as a whole, majorly detracting from my enjoyment of it.

Interestingly, I'd read a lot more about Clytemnestra and Elektra in other recent retellings, and I now got watch their lives unfold from a different perspective. Penelope's son Telemachus, intent on proving he is a worthy successor to his father, joins the militia movement that is training for fighting the raiders who target their island at regular intervals. Narrated by Hera, it immerses you in Penelope's story and the wider tales of other women, both goddesses and slaves, as well as Penelope's son and her suitors . So yes, it's about war, too, and what war does to the women left behind, stuck in a culture that tells them they can do nothing even when there is no one else left to do it. The women of Ithaca have been left alone for almost seventeen years since the men of their island left to fight with King Odysseus at Troy.In the tumultuous aftermath of the Trojan War, a young man battles to save his home and his inheritance. It's not the first time I've come across this kind of reading of Penelope; that honor belongs to my first and only classics course, provocatively titled, "Monsters, Barbarians, and Women.

The balance she was able to strike between respecting the material while also delivering snark and sarcasm in a way that brightened the story without ever making light of it, was astounding. This could only be done by someone with a firm foundation in the source material who also has a brilliant ability to wield her craft. I don't know how much of this was already mentioned briefly in the tales of old, and how much is from Claire North's imagination, but it feels completely seamless – as if this is how the story was meant to be told all along. I'd like to continue seeing more of the gods and goddesses that watch down on the mortals of the story – and sometimes intervene – but not at the expense of connecting with the main characters.It tells a story that is full of betrayal and scheming, of friendships forged and friendships broken, of goddess and queens, love and death, and of fate and free will. there is an originality of voice here that I have not come across in Irish fiction for quite some years now. Jason’s jaunts around town are reminiscent of Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy – young bucks who are wonderful mimics of adult mannerisms while simultaneously struggling to understand the intricacies and injustices of the grown-up world . Putting Hera in the narrator's seat, means that the gods and goddesses also linger at the edges of the pages of Ithaca, which is very exciting and leaves this reimagined world wide open for potential further explorations of Olympus.

Claire North is actually Catherine Webb, a Carnegie Medal-nominated young-adult novel author whose first book, Mirror Dreams, was written when she was just 14 years old. I’ve not read any of Claire North’s work before and was quite aware of her many novels that are more towards science fiction.It took me a while to get my head around the different mindset that Penelople’s character is in here, as I was eager to be drawn in by her emotional story again. Patrick Dillon has been fascinated by Homer's epic poem The Odyssey since studying it at school, and has traveled extensively in Greece.

Updating the second oldest extant work of Western literature, Homer’s Odyssey, seems a daunting task, but the author entertainingly succeeds. Skilfully meshing imagination with reality, McMonagle sets out to discover if the same things can be found at home.But when I find a book that not only retells one of these timeless stories, it breathes new life into it, it becomes an instant favorite.