Elektra: No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller from the Author of ARIADNE

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Yes, I was surprised because we are talking about Elektra and her mother, Clytemnestra; can't love them both, every time you should hate one of them, but not in this book! I shook my head, as though I could dislodge the idea altogether. It would all change, even more so. A hundred men had come to marry her; the next one would take Menelaus’ place in an instant. Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae of the House of Atreus, mother of Iphigenia, Elektra and Orestes. Her rage resulting from Agamemnon’s sacrifice of her firstborn daughter Iphigenia in Aulis before the Trojan War wreaks havoc in Mycenae and the cursed House of Atreus

So, I propose that we all swear that, no matter whom she chooses, we will all join him in protecting her. We will all make a most solemn vow that we shall defend his right to have her—and keep her—with our own lives.” I found Elektra really hard to sympathise with at times- she is a selfish character and her empathy for others is hardly there. She chooses not to see things from Clytemnestra’s POV where her father, Agamemnon (Clytemnestra’s husband) purposely murders and sacrifices Iphigenia for a wind to take the army to Troy. Instead as Elektra takes the view of the sacrifice being god ordained- she cannot understand why Clytemnestra is grieving and hating her father. She then spends her time on out thinking about revenge. She also doesn’t seem to care about others around her- especially how she treats her friend Georgios and has a weird Oedipus complex about Agamemnon.

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We all know the story, the curse of House of Atreus, fratricide, sacrificing daughter; a long war that began in the name of only one woman; and the prophecy for the seventh child of Queen Hecabe. When Theseus, Prince of Athens, arrives in Crete as a sacrifice to the beast, Ariadne falls in love with him. But helping Theseus kill the monster means betraying her family and country, and Ariadne knows only too well that in a world ruled by mercurial gods - drawing their attention can cost you everything. Not to mention how she thinks Cassandra should feel so glad (!) to have been kidnapped by Agamemnon because the place she lives in now is so pretty and a palace like the one Cassandra grew up in and how being raped by a king (especially one like her fantastic father) is such an honor. *tears out own hair* Can’t you see that it just goes on, over and over? The gods demand their justice, but we suffer for it, every time.”

The only issue I have is that there have been many of retellings featuring Troy and Clytemnestra/Helen recently and so nothing particularly new came to light of me. I rolled my eyes. Odysseus was here as one of Helen’s suitors just like the rest of them, but of course nothing that man did was as it seemed. We could rather do with his famous wits in this situation, I thought, frustrated that he instead preferred to lose himself in some romantic daydream. My huge thanks to Headline Audio via NetGalley for giving me a chance to listen to Elektra by Jennifer Saint, I have given my honest review. Each main character of this book is very well narrated by Beth Eyre, Jane Collingwood and Julie Teal. I could see that every man in the room was imagining it. They had all envisaged being the one to have her, but Odysseus had soured the dream. They gazed up at him, enrapt, waiting for him to reveal the solution to the conundrum he had presented.Elektra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, unflinching in her loyalty to her father chooses to justify his actions as the will of the Gods and will do anything to exact revenge on those who were responsible for her father’s demise. This book starts us off with before the Trojan war; Helen is in Sparta looking for a suitor and men from all over Greece have heard of her beauty and want her for a wife… apart from Agamemnon who meets Clytemnestra (and Odysseus, who finds interest in Penelope, Helens cousin). We witness Clytemnestra’s journey to Mycenae, the birth of their children… and of course the start of the Trojan war, as well as many more events that take place. How did they have the stomach for the fight still, I wondered. How could it be possible to rise every morning to that same grim, relentless slaughter, and then drink and sleep and wake to do it all again? I was looking forward to this because I've read the Sophocles and am familiar with the whole Freudian aspect from within Psychology and frankly, it was just nicely MESSED up as a tragedy.