What Hewlett lacks in depth and meaningful characterisation cannot be made up for by her prose, beautiful at it might be.

This was very disappointing. I'll admit, my expectations were set high, and this feeling only grew as I was introduced to Hewlett's descriptions. She paints beautifully vivid pictures and it's easy to get lost in the scenery of it all.

However, I have a lot of issues with this book - ones that became more apparent as the story progressed.

1. Many others before me have said this already, but there is a lot of trauma in this book, to the point where it can be described as "trauma porn." It gets to a point where it brings into question whether she is trying to communicate anything meaningful here or just writing suffering for suffering's sake. Everything is one-dimensional and black-and-white - all men are evil, egotistical, sadists, and all women are either fierce or kind.

2. Speaking of characterisation, god did this get tiring. Melanthius serves pretty much no purpose aside from being a plot device that continuously puts Melantho in danger (one could argue that he represents the toxic masculinity these men face, but once again, this is reflected in every other character so he is really not needed to do this). Melantho has some good qualities, but she also gets very irritating and dense when she takes things Penelope says at face value and gets pissed at her for it. I This arc happens at least 3 times where Melantho doesn't understand that Penelope is lying because other people are present, and she gets mad at her and then later they talk it out. So frustrating. Penelope also has her own issues but I'll get there.

3. The romance. It was dragged out in such a way that when the characters finally kissed, everyone in the forum didn't gaf anymore. That's not a sign of good tension being built 😬. And the first time they had sex? I couldn't get into it because of the crazy whiplash I got from Penelope wielding her power over Melantho by not letting her leave, before the two of them suddenly have sex. No thanks. They are so messy and flawed (with Penelope unable to understand how stringing Melantho along is selfish and lowkey an abuse of her power; and Melantho using Eumaeus as a rebound and not explaining or apologising or anything) and it's hard to root for them when it feels like they're going to keep running circles around each other forever.

4. The MASSIVE time skips that made no sense and created plot holes. I'm not gonna go into this one.

5. Hewlett's tendency to not trust her readers, and also accidentally using modern / time-inaccurate language. Why are we translating Greek words in a character's train of thoughts? That's not natural. I'm not thinking to myself, "In English, love is a word for desire." Also there was this other quote where she said "Tell me that's not weird" or something like that. This book is very easy to read, which I had originally enjoyed, before it became clear to me that the reason it was easy to read was because the language wasn't believable for the time. I'm not saying to write in Ancient Greek riddles, but some things clearly didn't match the time period (like making a small dick joke as an insult, when those were preferred back then).

Alright, that's it. I might have more later but these were my initial thoughts after finishing the book.