Boy, it’s great when a book that has been on my to-read list for a long time turns out to be even better than I’d hoped.
Like Madeline Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles (both of which I loved) A Thousand Ships is a re-telling of the Greek myths from the women’s point of view – in this case, the Trojan War. It’s both funny and heartbreaking by turns and, while it’s more modern and not as poetic as Miller’s prose, I enjoyed Haynes’ writing style.
A passage near the end of the book from Calliope, the Muse of poetry, expresses the aim of the story better than I ever could:
“…I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough…A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?”