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

Product Information

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. I’m so very excited for Atalanta, mostly because my girl needs a lot more stories than what she has. On a side note the hardback edition is stunning with its gold, green and black cover art and endpapers. Nitpicky, I know, just something I noticed, yet which, of course, did not take away from the overall telling of the tale.

Jennifer Saint explores how suffering is passed down generations in this compelling novel, told in rich and evocative prose. Elektra is her daughter by Agamemnon who, along with her brother Orestes, works to avenge their father by killing their mother. Jennifer Saint is now a full-time author, living in Yorkshire, England, with her husband and two children. Yes, I was surprised because we are talking about Elektra and her mother, Clytemnestra; can't love them both, every time you should hate one of them, but not in this book! A specific quote, "He would not burn his beloved's body until he had sated his vengeance" gave me the chills.

Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy and Hecabe , blessed with prophetic vision that nobody believes, her warnings and pleas fall on deaf ears as Troy falls. I have always felt a great deal for Cassandra given the nature of her curse as well as her fate following the Fall of Troy. Each main character of this book is very well narrated by Beth Eyre, Jane Collingwood and Julie Teal.

It might be different if, for instance, Saint had swapped Elektra for someone farther removed from Clytemnestra so that it felt like three women coming from three vastly different places rather than leaving Cassandra as such an outlier. But the long periods of waiting between events, the awkwardly chosen POVs, and the unspectacular writing left me fairly cold. 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.Admittedly, I didn't particularly like Elektra, as a person, but her story was just as interesting to me as the others'. It’s a pretty straightforward retelling in that aside from clarifying emotion and focusing its attention on characters who are usually left on the sidelines, so it doesn’t necessarily bring a whole lot that’s new to the story, and the writing is fine but not spectacular. How could it be possible to rise every morning to that same grim, relentless slaughter, and then drink and sleep and wake to do it all again? The house of Atreus is cursed- through generations of murder, usurping’s of the throne of Mycenae, and cannabalism. The relationship between mother and daughter is very fraught and obviously does not end well for either of them.