Elektra: No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller from the Author of ARIADNE

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The writing was beautiful and sensitive and just an absolute masterpiece of retelling classic stories. Nevertheless, I wanted to read this if only for my love of mythology and I am glad that I did despite this not being as good as the author's previous book. In Jennifer Saint's prose you can hear the songs of the poets, feel the floors beneath your feet, smell the wood burning in the fire and experience the story of these three very different women as if you are there. I was looking forward to this because I've read the Sophocles and am familiar with the whole Freudian aspect from within Psychology and frankly, it was just nicely MESSED up as a tragedy.

With the stories of the characters she's chosen so well-defined and told already, she has very little leg room for her own added flair or take on them.Yes, she intersects them at the end, but it is so brief that it does feel like enough justification for her presence. The whole thing where she TRIED TO REASON HER FATHER'S TAKING AND *RAPING* OF BRISEIS JUST LEFT ME SHOCKED. Due to a lifelong fascination with Ancient Greek mythology, Jennifer Saint read Classical Studies at King's College, London.

Unlike Ariadne who I wished took more control, the women in Elektra took decisive actions that forever changed the course of their story.The wives, daughters, and mothers created their own brand of magic and menace as we learned of the dangers and terrible atrocities committed, by them, in the name of love, survival and revenge. Thanks to Netgalley and Flatiron Books for the advanced reader copy and opportunity to provide an honest review. It's ironic that the character whose name is the title of this book is also the one I enjoyed the least and dreaded reading. While I enjoyed Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, which I thought was an impressive debut, I found Elektra to be a more powerful and absorbing novel.

I feel like Saint's retellings just follow the original texts too closely, but that's on me, not her. I loved (while I hated) every second of walking through their grief and seeing all the different ways one deals with it.We see Clytemnestra as she spends 10 years of the Trojan war planning her murder of Agamemnon, especially after he murdered their first daughter, Iphigenia. The latter was surprising to me since she wasn't related and thus didn't really fit despite what happened to her after the fall of Troy.