Greek Myths: A New Retelling, with drawings by Chris Ofili

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A young woman and her sister, Procne who long to be birds to explore the world around them, but Procne's husband has other terrible ideas about Philomela.

If you want a feminist (revisionist) retelling where the main female protagonist is actually interesting and/ or gets a redemption arc, THIS IS REALLY NOT THAT BOOK. Some women are again, just background stories and the guys who pop up in myths are reinvented rather than the woman. What the Greeks really wanted, all along, was Troy's wealth They wanted the treasuries of her temples emptied out, her women lined up and shared out-soft bodies on which to vent their rage and greed. The chapters being named after different female characters were misleading, and pretty irrelevant as each chapter didn't actually focus on the character but rather just covered a plethora of different stories and figures that didn't really have any common connection between them and also weren't very developed.

The only issue I had with this was when it came to retelling Heracles and his story- it wasn’t particularly linear, so if you were someone who maybe hadn’t read the myths it might seem a little confusing. My favourite was definitely the perspective of Eurydice as she descends into the Underworld and spends time down there before Orpheus arrives- especially as I’ve never read the underworld from Eurydices POV before - I very much enjoyed her travels with Hermes. I sort of wish I’d come across this when I was younger — this is a great ‘introduction’ to Greek myth without having to scour and pull together lots of disparate sources. In this powerful new collection, Charlotte Higgins foregrounds Greek mythology's most enduring heroines. So, I think it is pretty well established around here that I am a sucker for a good Greek myth retelling and even a new interpretation of the Greek myths so is it really a surprise that I’ve gone ahead and read this one as well?

CONTENT WARNING - the classical myths are full of repulsive behaviour, mostly on the part of male gods. The first chapter is Athena, weaving the story of the creation of the world - some other characters are Medea, Circe, Helen, and Penelope. Since I really, really loved Madeline Miller’s Circe, I could not have been more enchanted with her niece Medea’s story and the way Higgins (re)told it. Other chapters also incorporate The Odyssey, The Homeric Hymns, Euripides, Sophocles, etc, but these are all interwoven and retold amazingly.Although her chief model is Ovid’s phantasmagoric mythological compendium in his Metamorphoses, her voice is quite different – more tender and pensive – and she uses her considerable scholarly skills to mine many other ancient sources, rescuing some little-known stories from obscurity. the classical myths are all entwined and so the stories have nice continuity, characters telling of their mother, aunts, and sisters.

Photograph: IanDagnall Computing/Alamy View image in fullscreen Penelope weaves a design ‘as intricate as her own involved, withheld mind’ … Detail from Penelope and the Suitors by John William Waterhouse. Athena, Alcithoë, Philomela, Arachne, and the Homeric weavers Andromache, Helen, Circe and Penelope function as Higgins’ quasi-narrators, except that the stories they tell are depicted on their looms’ warp and weft and described by the ninth Muse in this collection, Higgins herself. Theirs' are the hands which are responsible for piecing together the elaborate and imaginative tapestry that exists to make sense of the world. This New Noise, a book based on her nine-part series of reports on the BBC, was published by Guardian-Faber in 2015.So, while the timeline does jump around a bit, it does help you to see the characters that you might recognise from other myths and how they relate to the older ones. It’s as though the author took Wikipedia pages, summarized them in third person past tense, and then at the end of every story adds “and this is what Penelope/Helen/Arachne/whomever wove“ because all the stories are supposed to be tapestries. It felt like the author was in a rush while writing them, and the reader doesn’t have much opportunity to fully embrace the characters and their stories, which should be the whole point of the book.

This is not what he thought he had made, this dishevelled woman with sweat glinting off her clavicle, this woman shrieking like something escaped from Hades, this woman now staggering towards the door and her liberty. Higgins does a great job of following Greek myths through many of its famous women, but they are all linked by the loom and their weave depicting some of the terrible things the gods and goddesses have done. And it's not just now I've absolutely adored every retelling/modern interpretation of her, it just works for me, and she's once more my favorite voice here - again, makes sense when my favorite female characters of all time play into the archetype of Penelope - just her mind makes it all so worth it! They are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures and resourceful witches. Again, it was literally just a retelling of LOADS of different myths randomly bundled up into one book.He didn't tell her that after the pair escaped from Crete they put in for the night on the island of Naxos. She is an associate member of the Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and is on the board of the Henry Barber Trust. Charlotte Higgins's previous books include the acclaimed Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, which was shortlisted for awards including the Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) Prize for non-fiction, and Red Thread, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and won the Arnold Bennett Prize 2019. Its thoughtful introduction, ample notes pointing to the ancient sources, bibliography of accessible further reading, maps, genealogies and glossary make it a useful resource for far more advanced adult readers. Absolutely not, not even as a first-time reader of the myths, since the author manages something that I didn’t ever think it was possible: she makes Greek mythology terribly boring and unengaging.