kbreads96 's review for:

Daughters of Sparta by Claire Heywood

2.0

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It was… fine. However, as a voracious reader of Greek mythology and a huge fan of Helen and her sister, I was disappointed with the flatness of the characters. They were missing a spark for me. Rather than being strong, inspiring, fierce women of power, taking control of their lives and their fates, they were instead buffeted by their poor fate of being women in Greece. Their stories are some of the most compelling; Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon in revenge for her daughter is such an infamous legend, and the story behind the woman should have been equally as passionate and fierce, and it just…. wasn’t. So many important details were missing or changed, which completely took me out of the story, like why Achilles targets Hector, and how Cassandra dies, or Cassandra’s curse of prophecy, or why Paris goes after Helen in the first place. I’m disappointed by the lack of characterization, and after reading such beautiful adaptations from Natalie Haynes and Madeline Miller, my expectations were very high, so this book just falls flat.