Daughters of Sparta is a vivid and illuminating reimagining of the Siege of Troy, told through the perspectives of two women whose voices have been ignored for far too long. 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 Required reading for fans of Circe . . . a remarkable, thrilling debut‘– Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue As princesses of Sparta, Helen and Klytemnestra have known nothing but luxury and plenty. With their high birth and unrivalled beauty, they are the envy of all of Greece. Overall, Daughter of Sparta is a solid read that will take you to a heart-pounding journey along with your favourite classic Greek myths.

For millennia, two women have been blamed for the fall of a mighty civilisation – but now it’s time to hear their side of the story . . . I very much enjoyed the fact that Heywood chose to split the focus of the novel between the two sisters. While both Klytemnestra and Helen are, of course, famous individually, I daresay that relatively few people recognize that they were, in fact, siblings. In bringing them both into the frame as part of the same story, Heywood allows us to see how firmly intertwined their fates were from the beginning and how much they remained so throughout their lives. After all, were it not for Helen’s decision to abscond with Paris for Troy, Kyltemnestra wouldn’t have lost her daughter and wouldn’t have been driven toHeywood 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. The motivations for one of the “villains” involved also didn’t quite hold enough weight in my opinion; it didn’t make sense to me that he would be willing to participate in a plot that would destroy his own immense powers. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it at that. 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. 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.

urn:lcp:daughtersofspart0000heyw:lcpdf:d74a4db9-59ba-4988-bab7-170d0af8f677 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier daughtersofspart0000heyw Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2httzfr33c Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780593184356 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?As its title implies, Heywood’s book focuses on two daughters of the Spartan monarchs, Helen and Klytemnestra. Though they are both born into wealth and prestige, they soon take very different live paths. Klytemnestra, though originally the heir to her father’s throne, is instead married to Agamemnon, newly-crowned king of Mycenae. Neither of them, however, find much happiness. Claire Heywood masterfully reimagines their lives as princesses of Sparta—first as pawns in the plots and games of men, and then as powerhouses capable of standing on their own and commanding whole kingdoms. Daughters of Sparta is a fantastic rewriting of an age-old tale.” — Bitch Magazine

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.This brings up one of my main issues with Daughters of Sparta: By removing the gods from the story entirely as agents, Heywood removes a prime mover within the Homeric narrative. This accords with some modern views, but it denies an important feature (among others) of the myths, which is that they existed to explain the human condition, and central to this condition was a dynamic between immortal power and mortal bodies. What differentiates gods from humans in the mythical world is that the gods are more powerful and eternal. Thus humans, being weaker and mortal, can become instruments through which gods achieve their ends. A powerful wind can change a navy’s plans, for example, putting it on a disastrous course. The cycles of nature dictate farming and harvesting. And so on. In the Iliad, Helen gets pushed around and threatened by Aphrodite, who wishes Paris to be rewarded for having chosen her as the “most beautiful” and engineers events accordingly. Klytemnestra becomes the instrument through which Agamemnon is punished by the gods, for various offenses. Heywood tells us these two women were blamed, but ancient sources are far more nuanced. In the Iliad, Helen blames herself, but the Trojans do not. Not so in Heywood. Her Trojans despise and blame Helen for having brought destruction to their gates.