Reviews with content warning for Fire/Fire injury - A Thousand Ships

Reviews tagging 'Fire/Fire injury'

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

53 reviews

cerilouisereads's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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anousha_reads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional sad tense

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? It's complicated

5.0

SO so wonderful! I loved getting to see all sides of the war and truly seeing it from the perspectives that simply don't get shared. It asks all the hard questions that the bards don't answer, "What happens to the women and children who survived after the Greeks won the Trojan War?", "What about all the wives who lost their husbands and children who lost their fathers?", etc. I feel like I have a much better understanding on it now, and I actually preferred this to any other recounting and the Iliad and Odyssey themselves. It covers the entire story (for the most part), this time including the women.

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aseel_reads's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

this was a great retelling of the trojan war/post-war events. it was easy to keep all the different characters in your mind and you switched from different perspectives. i liked the non-linear format of the story and Calliope's hard hitting sentences about the impact of war (lots of parts underlined). i liked that helen wasn't protrayed as the evil woman. just an overall great read.

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elizabeth_lepore's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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ashleycmms's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

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jeannekmele's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

cws: rape, child death, slavery, war, grief/trauma, genocide mention, spoilers

An exceptional collection of nearly universal tragedy across its heroines, pyrrhic victories are the norm for women whose darkest moments shine with vibrant human spirit on the pages of A THOUSAND SHIPS.

So often left footnotes--wives, mothers, sisters, sluts and daughters written to live, die, and love for the storied men of old--any background knowledge of the classical canon will lend an unerring hand to the conclusions we know these women will come to. Yet you cannot help but root for their success, or their peace if no such thing exist; despite the ends long since written for them, their human resilience and fragility and the womanly grit behind it all almost feels as if history could rewrite itself this time.
It doesn't, of course, but this in of itself is the devoted intersection of care and craft.

Though ATS is tragedy from the first page to last, the deluge of misery and loss roils and settles with the comfortable shape of a story until you're left with a sense of resolution that is not gratifying, but it is real. And that is the way of tragedy, trauma, and war: these things cannot be reversed, nor smoothed over, nor sated.

Andromache's family, first husband and son are dead; but she has another husband, another son, and her freedom; perhaps that must be enough. Penelope loses twenty years of her life, marriage, queenship and motherhood waiting for a husband who never comes home to her. But there is a like man in their bed, and his name is Odysseus, and perhaps that will have to be enough.

What of Eris, the instigator? What of Helen, the adulteress, the end of a kingdom? It is very easy, in a song about war, to glorify and vilify to the whims of one's own biases, or heroes, or chosen themes. I don't believe you will find such binary in this book.

A mother kills children to avenge her own. Slave-owners and rapists (we'll save the discussion on rape, duious consent, and power in the classical canon for another time) show gentleness and provision to their victims, even when regarded as property. The selfish goddesses who set a decade of devastation and a death toll unnumbered are, themselves, steered from the shadows by intentions as selfless and pragmatic as they are genocidal.

I will quote Natalie Haynes' afterword: 'Survivors, victims, perpetrators: these roles are not always separate. People can be wounded and wounding at the same time, or at different times in the same life.'

It would be erroneous to go into A THOUSAND SHIPS expecting anything less than complex women with rich inner lives under extraneous circumstances. In the man-made disaster that is war, it becomes impractical and impossible to keep an orderly measure of right and wrong. The human condition warps into something immeasurable under such extreme duress. Though by no means a soothing read, I nonetheless devoured ATS as I haven't done with a book in a long time.

I will close with this: Grief is a long-lived creature with many faces that may come in any amount or combination at any time, in three days or five years, or decades hence. Grief is angry, and loud, and dead-eyed; it is wasting away and endless tears and twists in our chests that by right of anatomy shouldn't twist there; it is jealousy and accusation and cruelty and violence and submission and insanity.
Grief is ugly, and so often in contemporary western culture it is unsightly and to be repressed. In women, grief is mockingly anticipated, oppressively levied, and mercilessly culled. A THOUSAND SHIPS is an excellent read across the board, but for those who are processing grief and trauma, who may be unsure how to (especially women), it is a cathartic and humanizing portrait of the externally-inflicted and yet worst, most unacceptable parts of ourselves that are too big for our bodies, and too loud for the world.

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crazytourists_books's review against another edition

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emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.0

Retellings of ancient myths have been around for many years, but lately they are particularly popular. Personally, I like them, a new perspective to they myths that dominated my youth growing up in Greece is welcome and interesting!
This book started nicely, the prose is definitely beautiful. But it lost its grip on me for a couple of reasons.
I wanted more of Helen, the perspective of the woman that "started" a war would have been quite interesting. However, we only heard her voice a couple of times, as an afterthought, merely because she was present at the scene.
I didn't particularly like the chapters dedicated to Penelope, not because they were not nicely written, but because it was a summary of the Odyssey. Nothing new.
I wanted more of the women of Troy, during the siege and after the destruction of the city. That would have been an amazing retelling.

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