Like they don’t do much in terms of actually progressing towards their goals for much of it – just attraction and vibes and not killing Mathias when they have very good opportunities for… reasons? Achilles and Patroclus are quite famous, and Zeus and Ganymede, but lesbian and queer women relationships were not really ‘allowed. this is a gorgeous, heart wrenching story that imagines the fate of penelope's twelve hanged maids as only the first set of hangings in a curse spanning centuries. Sarah Underwood's classical reimagining is woven with pure magic: salt-laced myths, a plot that slowly unravels like a tapestry, and vivid characters who are destined to steal your heart.

She’s also often portrayed as blameless when it comes to the maids, and I think, ‘if she’s really that clever and manipulative, could she not have found a way out? As for the mythology aspect of it, I'm not really acquainted with the Greek myths so I'll leave people who know the stories and have read the Odyssey ( yes, the Odyssey Miss Underwood. the audacity of this British bitch to get a six-figure advance for a “retelling” of a book she HASN’T EVEN READ.I am especially interested in Greek retellings at the moment and will be reading a lot of them over the next few months, so expect a lot more reviews to come!

Leto is like no other heroine I've read, she is passionate, strong and genuine, she only wants revenge for what she suffered. I'm reading about two men who both believe they are owed something from women for their services of protection, but I don't understand why one is presented as evil while the other isn't.the part that’s crazy is that she states that “mythology has bypassed YA” even though she claims reading a lot to “keep on top of market trends. I absolutely loved Melantho’s story and how she fell in love with Leto, who was one of the twelve maidens sacrificed to Poseidon by Prince Mathias of Ithaca. I thought to myself many times that if you changed this names of people, places, things to typical fantasy genre names no one would notice. melantho almost dies like three times throughout the novel, so it’s no surprise when she dies at the end. It is never explained exactly how the marked girls are found and located and it explicitly states they can come from all across the Island.

poc authors are often turned away because greek mythology retellings have been done so much, and retellings of their own mythology are heavily scrutinized and need to meet high standards, yet this white author was handed a six figure deal and didn’t even read the original work that her book claims to be retelling. That’s what’s great about them—they have those layers of depth that can be unpacked when you read them again.I get she wanting to give justice to these twelve maidens, killed by a cruel man, giving them space and a feminist pov, but I'm also a bit confused by not reading the original material because boring and long (according to this interview). She is currently studying for her postgraduate degree in Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge. Seeing white Anglophones publishing their “refinements” of foreign myths (Greek in this case, another example would be Ancient Chinese myths), and so many white academics occupying African American sections on bookshelves, upsets and demotivates me dreadfully.