When I first bought this, it was on the basis of its theme: a novel set in Ithaca during Odysseus' wanderings, ie. in between the fall of Troy and his return. I didn't realise that I had already read and loved a book by Claire North, ie. "the first 15 lives of Harry August". Not that it changes anything, but at least it makes sense that Ithaca should be so bloody good. So, the scene is Ithaca. The central character is Penelope, who walks a fine line between holding her suitors at bay (in part to avoid the inevitable civil war should she chose one over another), keeping Ithaca defended, pretending to be a meek queen so as not too seem improper, and try to understand and get closer to her son Telemachus who has been raised by women in the shadow of his father, the hero of Troy, and has strange and potentially toxic ideas about what it is to be a man. In this already tense situation, two external events threaten to topple the whole house of cards. There are three things (at least) that I find fantastic about this book. The first one is that it's a book about those the poets never write about: women, first and foremost (there are precious few men on Ithaca), but also commoners. Which leads to the second one: Claire North can quite freely build her plot and her characters in the shadows of "known" mythology: no one tells us what happened to the women of Ithaca before Odysseus came back. And the third is the narrator, who happens to be none other than the goddess Hera. Talk about an unreliable narrator! I raced through the book and loved it from the first to the last page.
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