Review Of A Thousand Ships

Review of A Thousand Ships

I was going to wait a read a collection of greek mythology book adaptations and make another post with multiple books, but I just felt so strongly about this one I'm making it's own post.

My review under the cut:

I was really looking forward to reading this book and to say I was disappointed is an understatement. I loved Circe and Ariadne so I thought this would be similar. I couldn't have been more wrong.

This book covers so many characters in a desire to give a voice to all the women in the Trojan War that you can only meet them shallowly. And because this book covers more of the Trojan War than even the Iliad does, it spend A LOT of time retelling/summarizing the surrounding myth. Like 80-90 of this book is just retelling what happened in the Trojan war. It's not even a good retelling, where you get a sense of the feelings of the characters, it's boringly factual, as entertaining and emotionally moving as reading a summary off wikipedia. It might be interesting if you don't know the story, but I know the Trojan war like the back of my hand. The same goes for most greek mythology. Yet I love myth adaptations, but a good adaptation depends on the skills of prose. And Hayes just doesn't have that.

So even with a "feminist retelling" a lot of time is spent going over the actions of the men in the war. Even Penelope's chapters are 90% her retelling the Odyssey with a few sassy remarks thrown in. How is that fair to Penelope? It's still the equivalent of saying she did nothing but sit back and have shit happen to her. It would have been smarter to focus on one character, so you could spend time looking at their contributions specifically. Because of the framing Hayes choose, we are still only seeing the women superficially. And it doesn't feel like they do anything, but are simply having things done to them. Like is it really feminist if your characters have no agency?

For a feminist retelling I'm really disappointed by how this book handles Helen. The characters all distinctly her and she isn't included in this book. The Iliad explicitly shows over and over that the war wasn't her or anyone's fault, everyone is a pawn in the god's game of chess. And yet her perspective isn't included because the author wants to take the easy route and blame the war on Helen and make her out to be a selfish bitch? Ok 🙄

The men almost are all depicted as selfish and evil, which gets rid of any nuance. They all either outright hate or disrespect women. Like, Hayes, buddy, I'm reading this bc I like the characters of the Iliad. If I'm the target audience, shitting on all the characters I like may not be the way to go. Also "all men treat women poorly" is so derivative and weak of a take for feminism. It's just not true. It's also the kind of thing that is a Terf red flag, and considering the author is a white woman from TERF island...

1/5 I hated it. I personally think if you are interested you should save your money, there are plenty of other good greek myth adaptations (and actual good feminist ones) that are more worthy of your time.