Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this ARC!
My 4 stars are a very picky four stars, because while Jennifer Saints writing is insanely good (lyrical but also clean), she cannot make me love or feel sympathy for Elektra. But Elektra has always been a tough character to take on and this was an ambitious project for Jennifer Saint.
Yet, I do feel like Jennifer Saint was able to make us understand her a bit more, if not love her. Elektra, is like her mother in that sense, she does not need our sympathy or our love, she condemns her siblings, and like Clytemnestra, gives more time to the dead than those who are alive. Her entitlement is that of her fathers, for example her poor friend who supported her unconditionally was tossed aside the second she could find a suitor of rank. She assumes that Cassandra would have told her wonderful stories of her father, without the slightest thought of the fact that he had killed her family and assaulted her. Elektra belongs to another time, the time where you were supposed to revenge your fathers ghost and be glad that he has slaves (she says that her mother would deny her father the comfort of slaves in that sense*), and a sacrifice for the gods (the sacrifice of Iphigenia) is perfectly necessary and appropriate, and she represents that thought fully. I feel like she can be appropriately compared to Ajax, from the play by the same name by Sophocles in the sense that the death of Ajax can be compared to the death of a particular style of hero. The death of Clytemnestra and Menelaus’s subsequent refusal to support Orestes and Elektra, and also not take revenge for the sake of Agamemnon, feels like the end of the curse, especially with Orestes and Elektra purified as well. But Orestes rules, and Elektra who has demanded this, hides away and presumably never really gains power again. Her hiding away parallels Ajax’s death; and her style of revenge, the ways of the old die with her even if the family line continues.
The book has three POVs, Cassandra, Clytemnestra and Elektra, and does a fantastic job of complicating each woman. We have doses of Helen, she is the daughter of Zeus, and entitled to her share of bloodshed, but she’s also kind, warm and loyal, and able to see past the curse of Apollo.
*I don’t know what BookBub will allow me to say.