Not a fan. It’s about the maids, which is all good and dandy. I have nothing against a book about twelve maids who were raped, including one reader’s possible interpretation of what exactly happened (since in The Odyssey it is more or less summed up in one line). However, I’d have liked it better if it didn’t claim to be a “myth of Penelope and Odysseus.” Odysseus is a “presence” in this book, not a character. Penelope spends the entire time crying about her maids, and the maids have the most spotlight time of the whole thing.

Maybe if it was actually a coherent narrative I’d have liked it more, but I suppose I am not a big fan of the whole “verse, verse, prose, drama, prose, verse, prose” approach to splitting up a book (especially not the verse, though I do commend the inclusion based on the book’s predecessor - no one will ever come close to what Homer has done and I’d be happy enough with one little poem rather than several chapters). I’d like something more along the lines of, “While I was in my room weeping for the possible death of my husband, my maids were being raped. Told in confidence to me later, my youngest and most beautiful maid shared her plight. The Suitor tricked her into a blablabla” etc, and going on like that - perhaps a memoir of how Penelope reacted to these rapes, rather than how the maids reacted in their afterlife.

Speaking of that, I thought the afterlife thing was cute at first, and very useful, until it kept coming up and she kept making comments about all the things Penelope was missing. It’s as though they were only speaking from the Underworld so that Atwood could make commentary on the state of things today, so she could get Helen to say some useless crap about herself being beautiful and dudes following her into the afterlife. I’d have liked it more if, say, Penelope was writing this as a last (lost) memoir. At least then you could honestly say it was a “myth of Penelope and Odysseus” because the maids might only be included to put guilt on herself, rather than to take the “story” and run with it.

I am glad I read this book because now that mystery of “Margaret Atwood - amazing, or not?” is gone. I’d be open to reading another one, of course, because all books are different, but the writing style annoyed me just as much as the plot itself. Reminds me of how I wrote stories in 7th grade. I’ve come a long way since 7th grade.