I’ve just completed a back-to-back Greek re-telling marathon, and they deserve to be reviewed together! The first was Elektra by Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne, which was just released in May 2022. The second was Ithaca by Claire North, which is scheduled to be released September 2022 (thank you NetGalley for the ARC!). Both had issues, but they work better together. Ithaca feels like a wacky sequel to Elektra, extending the slightly rushed ending and giving the titular character Elektra the character development and agency she deserved. However, if you’re only going to pick one Greek story this year, I would choose Elektra over Ithaca for the better overall writing and the gorgeous righteous anger of Clytemnestra.
In Elektra, Saint uses three points of view – Clytemnestra, Cassandra, and Elektra. The choice to include Cassandra here is interesting, since she is on the opposing side of the war and separated from the Mycenean lives of Clytemnestra and her daughter Elektra for all but a brief moment in the novel’s timeline. Her inclusion makes the central focus of the book Agamemnon, since he is the central point that ties the three women together. I could see an argument to be made that she is included because all three women are fighting against what they are told is the will of the gods – the death of Iphigenia, Cassandra’s attempted rape by Apollo, Elektra’s fate as a child of the cursed House of Atreus. But if this is the case, why name the book after Elektra, the one who does the least struggling against her fate? She does very little throughout the book, other than argue with her mother and pine for her absent father. She felt underdeveloped and underutilized, and I found myself wishing I could skip her chapters more often than not.
Elektra finally gets the telling she deserves in Ithaca, where Claire North paints her as the mastermind behind her brother Orestes’s quest to avenge his father and the future of Greek queenhood. North use’s Hera’s point of view throughout the novel, reading situations with the frustration of a goddess banned from meddling by her husband-king Zeus. Hera loves Clytemnestra for the freedom she seized in ruling Mycenae, taking a lover, and killing her husband, but North’s plot loves Penelope more, for her subjugation and willingness to put her own needs below those of her husband’s lands, in a form of feminism that feels as frustrated as Hera. The book had minor editing and tonal issues that will hopefully be resolved before the final release – there are mythology mistakes that do come across as mistakes, rather than purposeful edits for the sake of the novel, and Hera cracks some jokes that feel off-tone for the rest of the novel. Either be a comedy or don’t. Also, it is 2022, and we do not need another narrative in which all the enslaved women love and would die for their mistress and have no qualms about being enslaved. I would have loved to have seen North spend some time complicating the enslaved women and their relationships with Penelope.
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