Review: Elektra by Jennifer Saint
I really enjoyed this book. I love a retelling. I think that I like the way the reader gets to engage with intertextuality between both the book the the original work and the book and other works inspired by the original. I just find it really engaging. But I also found this story interesting and engaging in its own right.
This story follows Agamemnon's daughter Elektra, her mother Clytemnestra, and the Trojan seer Cassandra. It mostly follows the events of the Trojan war as told by Aeschylus but also definitely engages with the Iliad as well. Homer stans don't lament.
An aspect of this retelling that I found really interesting was the way Saint treats Helen in this book. Obviously in classical tellings of this story Helen's point of view is not really explored, we get the stories of the men that surrounded Helen, they cast their assumptions about her motives but we don't explore Helen's motives from her point of view. This book also doesn't really get a ton of information about Helen directly from Helen. I thought it was a really interesting choice to have the women around Helen be the ones talking about her. To see her through the eyes of her sister who deeply loved her, her niece who only knows her aunt through gossip, and Cassandra who has a really interesting relationship with Helen.
So much of this book is about grief. Clytemnestra's story most obviously engages with the theme, but Elektra is clearly grieving her relationship with both of her parents, and Cassandra is grieving the loss of safety she feels multiple times in this novel and the loss of being treated as sane. I just really found each woman's relationship with grief and the violence they were experiencing to be really fascinating.
Somewhere where this book didn't work quite as strongly on me was the emotional reaction. I really liked this book intellectually and I was really engaged with the characters and following their emotional journeys. But I mostly felt interest and curiosity and did not have a similar emotional reaction to the emotions the characters were experiencing. This could be because I was reading on a very tight deadline (about 8 hours between start and deadline, and I still had to do a few things).
I had a really good time reading this book and really look forward to reading both her first novel and her upcoming book.
I gave this book four stars.
