Book #278. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. This isn’t written as a story, each chapter is like a moment in time of a character. Sometimes there are more than one chapter (not consecutively) around that moment. Other times that is the only chapter on that specific character. Not a particularly easy reading material. I especially found this version of Achilles hard to swallow after how beautifully heartbreaking he was rendered in Song of Achilles. It’s most likely this is the more truthful (and violent) version. “When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else.” “Because the Spartan king had lost his queen, a hundred queens lost their kings.” “Who could love a coward, she had once heard a woman say. Laodamia knew the answer. Someone for whom the alternative is loving a corpse.” “And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?” #Bookstagram #ReadHarder #NatalieHayes #TrojanWomen https://www.instagram.com/p/CT4pN6TPMrDHFB_R1PRW9ndnk5ofNZSLMJpt940/?utm_medium=tumblr
