2 Book Lovers Reviews
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House of Odysseus
By Claire North
I was a huge fan of Claire North’s first book in the The Songs of Penelope Series. This is my bag, retelling of the ancient Greek epics. North is keeping this to a trilogy, which I think is perfect, long enough to really dig into the details, yet not so long and dragged out that the reader will lose interest.
The best part of Ithaca was the narration. North hit the nail on the head with Hera narrating Penelope’s story. Could she maintain that rock-star start? You know she did! With House of Odysseus, we have a new narrator, the one and only, Aphrodite. North did something magical here: book two in a series, same characters, continuation of the same storyline and a complete 360 in style and attitude. Aphrodite has sass coming out of her ying-yang (if Aphrodite had a ying-yang). This is stuff that would be completely out of character for Hera, she could not pull it off and it made for an incredibly fun read.
North brought in a few old friends from the Iliad and Odyssey. Menelaus and Helen were perfect characters to move this story forward. The face that launched a thousand ships and the buffoon. I never really like Menelaus or his blow-hard brother. Homer never really painted them in a good light, the Iliad and Odyssey had other heroes, and like Tina Turner, we don’t need another one.
The worst part of finishing House of Odysseus is waiting until June 18, 2024, to find out how North wraps up this trilogy. There are a lot of questions to be answered: Will Odysseus really kill them all? Will Telemachus be there when it happens? But most importantly, who is North recruiting to do the narration? My money is on Athena, but she seems a little too no-nonsense to tell an interesting story; she is more of a how-to kind of narrator. I would kind of like to see Artemis, she is the kind of girl to put an arrow through your eye just for looking at her the wrong way or any way at all for that matter. She would tell a fun story.
*5 Stars