How delightful. Fun mostly for readers of the Odyssey. ( )

Strong concept but the story feels more like a description of the concept than a story in itself. ( )

DNF at 70%

I cannot believe I am DNFing this! I am just so painfully bored and underwhelmed, which is truly tragic because I love all the ingredients here, but this is a spiceless dish.

Let me be explicit. I thoroughly enjoy Atwood's writing. I love Helenistic myth. I adore feminist retellings. I think the project is a wonderful and important and worthwhile endeavour. This one just doesn't do it for me.

I don't know if I've been spoilt by other retellings and stories from marginalised creators, but I just didn't get anything more out of the book itself than the very good premise. And this is Margaret Atwood doing Peneolpe's perspective of the Odyssey, but it's just fine, very light and one note on the feminism when there is a whole lot more to say, particularly with the handmaidens as many others have pointed out, as well as it not being very sex positive or sympathetic to the plight of slaves - which wouldn't be as big a deal of this wasn't a feminist retelling and technically being told from a modern time with Peneolpe reflecting on two thousand years. It's just kinda very white middle class feminism and boring to boot.

I'm sorry Margaret and to anyone who thinks this makes me a bad feminist. I just think we deserve more interesting stories and a greater grasp of kyriarchy and intersectionality in our post-millennium feminist literature. ( )

I am always confused when I read mythological retellings to give voice to the (usually voiceless) women in myth and then that one woman whom the author has given voice to spends a great chunk of her time talking about how awful all the OTHER women in myths are. In a brief 199 pages, Atwood manages to throw nearly every other female player in the orbit of Odysseus under the bus for seemingly no reason.

Additionally this retelling somehow failed at giving Penelope any type of personality. She truly was like the water her mother told her to be - formless and pliant. ( )

This short book is a retelling of the Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope, waiting on Ithaca for her husband's return and becoming increasingly desperate due to the depredations of the gang of 100 young suitors who are squatting at the palace and eating her out of house and home. It is framed as her reflections after her death when she is living in the Greek afterlife thousands of years later.

I found it curiously flat from the point of view of any fleshing-out of Penelope as a character. It does go into her earlier life a bit, but she remains rather self pitying and eaten up with jealousy of Helen, who is unsympathetically portrayed. I'm not unfamiliar with such a portrayal, having read Georgia Sallaska's 1970s 'Priam's Daughter' but it comes across as a bit odd in a modern work which sets out to give sympathetic voices to the female characters. I found it supremely ironic also that despite this ambition, the twelve maids are dealt with collectively and given no individuality. Only one even has a name. Penelope professes to be eaten up with guilt at their execution, but seems wholly ineffective in doing anything to head it off.

The book is structured so that narrative by Penelope is interspersed with poetry and song by the maids as a Greek chorus. Some of this becomes very surreal - a modern day court trying to ascertain Odysseus' culpability for the deaths of the suitors and maids, and a scholarly treatment discussing whether the maids' execution symbolises the overthrow of Goddess worship, personified by Penelope, by a patriarchal religion embodied by Odysseus.

Altogether, especially since I recently enjoyed the author's 'The Year of the Flood', I found this a disappointment and can only rate it as an OK 2 stars. ( )