"Sing, muse, he said. Well do you hear me? I have sung."

I really enjoyed this one and I cannot recommend enough the audiobook version narrated by the author.

Natalie Haynes' idea for this novel sounds like an uphill battle. Retelling the history of the Trojan War through all of the named women who only exist on the sidelines of its history? It seems impossible, and yet this book executes it so exquisitely. Each character's perspective (and there must be upwards of a dozen) is unique in its voice and stylization, and each woman's story is fully developed and executed. Haynes leaves nothing to the imagination; we get the whole of their stories, all of the gruesome, hopeless yet somehow hopeful scenes between the women themselves and the men who own them.

My favorite part of this novel is the way Haynes tied all of these stories together. Though you might not understand why we hear from a specific character at the start of the novel, a quarter later, her story will be connected to another woman's, and her name lives on. I am not well enough versed in all of the mythologies referenced in this book to know if these connections have any basis in that mythology, but they made me smile in the face of these women's insurmountable odds.

So often in books about war, they end shortly after the conclusion of the final battle. But Haynes answers the question that she herself prompts one of the Trojan Women in Chapter 3 to explicitly verbalize: "What happens after the end of the world?"