A Thousand Ships - Natalie Hayes

"

This is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s. They have
waited long enough for their turn . . .

This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of them all . . .

In the middle of the night, a woman wakes to find her beloved city engulfed in flames. Ten seemingly endless years of conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans are over. Troy has fallen.

From the Trojan women whose fates now lie in the hands of the Greeks, to the Amazon princess who fought Achilles on their behalf, to Penelope awaiting the return of Odysseus, to the three goddesses whose feud started it all, these are the stories of the women whose lives, loves, and rivalries were forever altered by this long and tragic war. 

A woman’s epic, powerfully imbued with new life, A Thousand Ships puts the women, girls and goddesses at the center of the Western world’s great tale ever told."

Elegantly written from the narration of Calliope, the goddess of epic poetry, through the book, the reader is given a unique perspective. As Calliope answers the pleas of a poet, she provides a compilation of the many women - goddesses, Greeks, and Trojans alike - whose lives were affected by the war. Although this book isn't told in chronological order, it is rather an anthology of stories, the narrative is quite cohesive and broad.

Natalie Haynes honours the women, raising their voices to provide a broader perspective on the war and it's aftermath. She flits from one woman to the next, introducing the perspective of five different women in the first fifty pages, with additional female characters to follow. Narrative perspective shifts from first to third-person. Some chapters follow a linear path while others fade in and out of the past and present. This leaping about, narratively and through time, gives the book a quality of being slightly patchwork and frenetic, disjointed. The systematic checking off of each woman's perspective minimizes character development, and while Haynes' writing is pretty it lacks the emotional depth or rawness that I think this book and it's subject matter really needed with the realities of women's lot in war being tiptoed around, further distancing the reader.

This is also a highly personal criticism but I really didn't enjoy Hayes's portrayal of the goddess, who seemed to lack any sense of gravitas or divinity. Rather reducing such powerful figures as Athena and Hera into 1 dimensional mean girl characters. Hardly in keeping with the "feminist" themes of the book. 

I would also say that it is rather harsh to say that women's voices have been ignored in the Trojan cycle. As if all those Athenian plays built around the figures and words of the women in these stories never existed: Euripides' The Trojan Women, Hecuba, Andromache; Aeschylus' Clytemnestra; Ovid's Heroides which rewrites epic from the points of view of women such as Penelope, Helen and Laodamia,

"He is learning that in any war, the victors may be destroyed as completely as the vanquished. They still have their lives, but they have given up everything else in order to keep them. They sacrifice what they do not realize they have until they have lost it. And so the man who can win the war can only rarely survive the peace." - One of my favourite quotes. 

Age Rating 16 +. Some references to rape but never explicit.