This book was one of my Book of the Month picks from September 2018. It’s pretty sad that I went that long without even considering picking it up. Why has it been on my shelf this long? I had hopes that one day I’d find interest and during this quarantine I finally did.
The Silence Of The Girls is a retelling of the Iliad but in the women’s perspective. The woman we are following, who was known as Achilles’s prize when the Greek army took over the city, is named Briseis.
Briseis was a Queen in a neighboring city of Troy and has now been reduced to a sex slave and servant to the men who murdered her family and took her land. Instead of following the famous Achilles and the soldiers in war, we get to see how the women left behind were treated.
I flew through this book in a day. It’s funny because we all know how The Iliad ends but I needed to know what would happen to Briseis. I have seen so many versions and read many versions of Achilles(even if Achilles is presented differently, it’s still usually close to the same story).
Briseis showed me things I don’t remember reading about in the Iliad, like the descriptions of the conditions of the camp and of course the women’s roles around the camp even while the Greek soldiers fought.
I’m glad I got this new insight into the story and I’m disappointed that I waited so long to read it.
The Aggressive Reader 