Electra

Starred review from October 21, 2013
Greenwood fans will welcome her thoughtful second reinterpretation of a well-known Greek myth (after Medea). Troy has fallen, and the surviving Greek leaders have undertaken their various journeys homeward. The fate of their supreme leader, Agamemnon, is conveyed through the eyes of his daughter Electra, who begins her narrative by recounting, “I knew she was going to kill him when she laid out the sacred tapestries.” As in her prior ancient historicals, Greenwood offers up several first-person storytellers, and makes them all convincing. The ignored Trojan seer Cassandra and the peripatetic Odysseus also lend their voices to the tale. Most significantly, Greenwood adds a new, but plausible wrinkle, basing her version on the assumption that revenge for Electra’s father’s death was not her sole motive in killing her mother, Clytemnestra, and her mother’s lover, Aegisthus. Among Greenwood’s other talents, she displays a gift for writing songs of the period.

November 15, 2013
The middle book of Greenwood's Delphic Women trilogy (originally published 199597) is the last to appear in the U.S. It is also the strongest, a sort of revisionist look at the aftermath of the fall of Troy. King Agamemnon returns, heroic, to Mycenae, only to fall victim to the murderous plot of his queen, Clytemnestra. Electra, the royal couple's daughter, is swept out of the city by Cassandra, the Trojan slave (and the focus of an earlier book in this series), hoping to get her safely to Delphi. Ancient Greek mythology is usually told from the point of view of the male characters, but Greenwood's three-book series focuses on the female players. This allows her to examine previously underexplored characters, motivations, and events. Known for the strong female protagonists, Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman, in her two mystery series, Greenwood does an excellent job here of giving the ancient Greek story a modern flavor, using lean, unadorned prose and dialogue to make it seem as though the story could be taking place today.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)