The Silence of the Girls

This started off strongly on the promise of telling the story of women in the Trojan war. I feel like by the time we got halfway through Achilles was centre stage and it never really recovered.

I also felt like I was being told rather than shown, especially for Briseis and Patroclus’s relationship.

I’m going to read on into the next book to see what that’s like, because I still enjoyed the retelling.

Definitely helps if you’re familiar with the references / names that get dropped.

This is a wonderful novel and frankly a lot more interesting to me than The Iliad itself. If anyone were ever looking for a GoT follow up I think Pat Barker has you covered. The violence was as graphic as Homer's poem but so much more personal and therefore horrifying. Barker's prose is smooth. She disappears behind the stitches of narrative and makes it all look easy.

Pat Barker does not shy away from the brutality of the Trojan War. For anyone wondering, I think this Patroclus can be reconciled with the one from The Song of Achilles, he is at least kind to Briseis.