Ithaca: The exquisite, gripping tale that breathes life into ancient myth (The Songs of Penelope)

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Penelope’s life and country hang in a tenuous balance, and it is up to her cunning and wit to maintain the peace of the kingdom. Narrated by Hera, the story comments on the different ways in which the most famous queens of Greece - Helen, Clytemnestra, and Penelope - navigate the balance between motherhood, womanhood, and queenhood. Of the three women most associated with the Iliad and Odyssey – Helen, Penelope and by association, Clytemnestra, two are profoundly ostracized in our cultural imaginations, and it’s only really Penelope – meek, diligent, chaste Penelope – who comes out the other side with the poet’s approval. Hera, the goddess of wives and narrator of Penelope's tale, tells the stories of women but also has much to say on the subject of men and her fellow Olympians vying for power. The author also used modern words and phrases scattered throughout the work which completely broke the little immersion there was with this book.

It's Hera, who looks down on Penelope, encouraging her along and rooting for her in times of difficulty.

But the stories that will live for ever are of the lost ones, the fearful ones, who through bitter hardship and despair find hope, find strength – find their way home. In what is becoming quite a saturated market of retellings, particularly feminist ones, the author has done a standout job of standing out. There was a lot of reading up on what the archaeology has to say about what people ate, and finally there was keeping in mind the twin narrative challenges of a) no written script and b) no coinage.

Equally, given there is so much mythology, you’re inevitably forced to make decisions about which bits you’re just going to wiggle around, both for narrative effect and also because it raises such awkward questions as “wait, how old was Achilles’ son when he burned Troy to the ground? But on the isle, it is the choices of the abandoned women—and their goddesses—that will change the course of the world. It's not the first time I've come across this kind of reading of Penelope; that honor belongs to my first and only classics course, provocatively titled, "Monsters, Barbarians, and Women. Athena loves it when a hunky warrior clad in bronze kneels before her inner sanctum, and when a man violated a woman upon her altar, it was the woman whose hair she turned to snakes in retribution for this sacrilege.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. But the storytelling itself - so key in the source material and so well executed by other modern authors - is uneven and distracting and detracting from the overall effort. She also has a strange fondness for Ithaca which she describes as barren and scraggy, uninteresting enough to her fellow Olympians to allow her to meddle unobserved.

They plot and scheme in secret, unobserved and underestimated by men who see them merely as objects for sexual gratification.There are so, so many versions of these stories, so many translations, so many fragments and different takes, so much brilliant and fascinating scholarship, and many modern books that lean into that admirably. I’ve been talking about how much I wanted to read Ithaca since last year, and I can’t even begin to explain the excitement I felt when I got an advanced copy of this beauty in the mail. From the suitors vying for her hand in marriage and the power that comes with it to the pirates threatening their shores to her sister hiding from her vengeance-seeking children, Penelope’s story is complex, filled with impossible obstacles, and riddled with danger. Because she's a goddess, she's able to comment on Penelope's thoughts and actions, as well as those around her.

There’s a lot that can be done - the Odyssey picks - and North covers a lot of ground, but perhaps too much. Interestingly, I'd read a lot more about Clytemnestra and Elektra in other recent retellings, and I now got watch their lives unfold from a different perspective.

But now that he has been absent, she faces a difficult choice – remarry to remain in power or likely be assassinated.