It’s taut, suspenseful, and full of Hera’s delightfully dyspeptic attitude.Ī thoroughly enjoyable exploration of Penelope’s side of the ancient story.Ī Canadian 30-something gets a second chance at love and career.

More straightforward and more visceral than much of North’s recent work, this is a ground-up view of Greek myth populated by spying maids, crafty merchants, and conniving queens. She picks favorites, she complains, she nudges, she rails against her own reduced position among the gods. As Penelope herself puts it, “The greatest power we women can own, is that we take in secret.” Hera is an appealingly involved narrator with a biting tongue (“Every little twerp is descended from Heracles these days”). Penelope’s story is one of secrets, of women working in the shadows, unnoticed and underestimated. Perhaps her biggest problem-or opportunity-is that she’s a woman, and even as a queen she’s expected to stay out of matters of state. And then there are the pirates who’ve been harrying the coast, the fact that Ithaca has no men of fighting age to defend it, and the troubling possibility that one of the suitors has sent the pirates to pressure her into capitulating.

First, there are the suitors: about a hundred men who trespass on her hospitality, waiting for her to admit that her husband, Odysseus, is dead and choose a new king of Ithaca. The queen of the gods narrates a crackling tale of secrets and intrigue.

Claire north ithaca review