276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Daughters of Sparta: A tale of secrets, betrayal and revenge from mythology's most vilified women

£8.495£16.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Claire M. Andrews, Daughter of Sparta Final Thoughts Flatlay of Daughter of Sparta on top of a notebook betweek a Greek painted dish and a teapot and wolf dish on the other side. As princesses of Sparta, Helen and Klytemnestra have known nothing but luxury and plenty. With their high birth and unrivaled beauty, they are the envy of all of Greece. But such privilege comes at a cost. While still only girls, the sisters are separated and married to foreign kings of their father’s choosing—

Heywood leaves the gods out of the story, other than as vague powers to whom characters refer, in this sense taking a quasi-historical/materialist/psychoanalytic rather than fantasy approach to the Trojan war myth. The choices she makes to achieve this approach toward the characters and their experiences are interesting to think about, and her prose is engaging. I believe this novel will find an enthusiastic audience among readers who enjoy modern women’s narratives dressed in ancient Greek costumes. As it is the presented, the quote seems to express the view of “Homer” in “the Odyssey.” But the quote is so decontextualized and chopped up as to be denuded of its meaning. If you’ve read the Odyssey, you might recall that the above words appear in book eleven as part of a speech by Agamemnon delivered post-mortem, from Hades, as he explains to Odysseus how he died. Oh and, not to spoil anything, but I adored the overall ending. It was not what I expected, but I thought it was just fitting.There is so much to appreciate about this book! Daphne has much more agency over her actions in this retelling. But when the weight of their husbands’ neglect, cruelty, and ambition becomes too heavy to bear, Helen and Klytemnestra must push against the constraints of their society to carve new lives for themselves, and in doing so, make waves that will ripple throughout the next three thousand years.

By the end, there are several questions left unanswered. There’s one question in particular that I really would’ve liked to know the answer to by the end of book one, but I suppose it’s going to have to wait until book two. A fresh, feminist reimagining of the Trojan War’s origins… Heywood paints a vivid portrait.” —Modern Mrs. Darcy Perfect for readers of Circe and Ariadne, Daughters of Sparta is a vivid and illuminating retelling of the Siege of Troy that tells the story of mythology's most vilified women from their own mouths at long last.Another disconnect between Heywood’s ancient Greece and the one that has come down to us through epic: Her Agamemnon obsesses about winning “glory,” which is accurate broadly speaking. But without the interplay between mortality and immortality that exists in epic, the concept of kleos—what Homeric heroes fight for—loses its meaning. What these heroes were trying to win was not some vague, undifferentiated “glory” but immortality through song (the aforementioned kleos). They want to be remembered and, through memory, to achieve a kind of immortality. Heywood chooses not to engage with the desire to be remembered as a genuine concern of humans. Her Agamemnon gloats that he was able to rally “all of Greece” by giving them “a cause”: “let them tell themselves they’re fighting for Greece, or liberty, or…whatever, and they’ll jump at the chance for some action.” Men just want to run around killing and dying in violent conflicts, apparently. For what reason? I definitely agree that Helen could very well have been someone who did not want to have children, and we have stories from antiquity about this as well (Artemis comes to mind immediately). But I feel like Heywood, because she was so focused on modern women’s empowerment, missed an opportunity to show us not only the limitations but also the challenges that created these restricted roles for women. For example, in the absence of science-based options (fertility clinics, surrogates) and assuming a practical need for male heirs, what options could a Helen have, who wants love and companionship but does not want to have children?

Lccn 2020047756 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9889 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-1200527 Openlibrary_edition Personally, I think it’s really interesting to think about needs and possibilities and how the ancients navigated those, both well and badly. I can appreciate the desire to tell stories that empower modern feminists, but then what is the reason to tell a story from a past and culture that the author does not want to take the time to understand in a nuanced way? And to be honest, there’s a lot more I could say, where she imposes a lot of attitudes that are clearly about modern not ancient life. There is so much cringe. I think if you’re going to enter a culture that is not your own, you have to be willing to see beyond your own resentments and anger and have the willingness and ability to see nuance and respect things that are different from you.

Become a Member

I’m always up for a juicy retelling of classical myth, and this seems to be something of a golden age for the genre, with the Trojan War occupying pride of place. In just the last decade alone we’ve had numerous reinterpretations of that pivotal conflict of ancient myth, ranging from Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (and its sequel The Women of Troy ) to Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships and, most recently, Claire Heywood’s Daughters of Sparta.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment