Often I amuse myself by trying to imagine the ideas, conversations, or circumstances that led to the writing of certain books. For example, I think Philippa Gregory wrote The Other Boleyn Girl because she wanted to write a smutty romance novel disguised as history, Shakespeare probably wrote The Taming of the Shrew because someone bet him he couldn't write a play where domestic abuse is interpreted as matrimonial devotion, and Bette Green wrote Summer of My German Soldier specifically to torture...

(B+) 77% | GoodNotes: It succeeds in its ambitious concept and style, but comes off more like a postscript to The Odyssey than its own story.

This was technically a reread, but I couldn't remember the specific dates I read it the first time, so I recorded this as a first time read.Such an enjoyable, quick and surprising retelling of The Odyssey from Penelope's perspective. Nearly everyone knows Odysseus, smart, witty, promiscuous; tackles 1 too many mythical beasts over the decade he is missing on his return from The Trojan War.Penelope is sassy, intelligent, and more than a little bit pissed off at her cousin Helen for causing this w...

The Penelopiad or The Ballad of the Dead MaidsThis has been my introduction to Atwood and I have to admit that I feel slightly underwhelmed. I went in with high expectations, wondering how Atwood will take the 'waiting widow' of The Odyssey and transform it into a full length novel. Turns out that she mostly indulges in recapitulating the bulk of the original with a few wild theories and speculations thrown in as supposed rumors that Penelope has gleaned in the after-life.Which brings me to how

➽ And the moral of this rereread is: still have nothing to report about this one. Except that it's sheer brilliance, obviously.I have it on (very good) authority that Margaret Atwood absolutely lurves this gif, just so you know. And I'm not even kidding. I think.[March 2015]The Greatness Syndrome: when a book is so original, thought-provoking and fantastically written that there is nothing to say about it.

This was so beautifully written. As someone who's fairly familiar with the myth of Penelope and Odysseus, it was quite fascinating to see how a modern-day writer would spin the story. Atwood did this brilliantly. I love stories that write from the perspective of the main character, especially when the said character is looking back in hindsight.Very creative.

I really do not like this book. I find it to be very poorly constructed with glaring inconsistencies and sadly underdeveloped characters that were merely pastiches rather than living, breathing, feeling, multi-layered human beings. But I'm lazy and not in the mood to write a review that deconstructs this whole abysmal mess. However, my good friend Gabby also read this (it was a book group read of ours) and she really takes the time to break things down in her review which I'm linking right here....

Stories about the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" have always been some of my favorites. I remember spending hours pouring over Robert Graves' "The Greek Myths" when I was a kid, and loving every strange and surreal stories in those pages. Those stories have gotten trendy again, if one is to judge by the amount of retellings gracing the shelves ("Circe", "The Silence of the Girls", "A Thousand Ships", etc.), but Margaret Atwood was, as usual, a little ahead of the curve.Odysseus is one of my favorite

3.5. A smart, funny and feminist response to The Odyssey, Atwood paints a full picture of Penelope’s perspective and shares it like a secret. You can tell Atwood’s having fun here, and part of that fun includes sprinkling in some bitterness and outrage to give the piece depth and meaning. I use the word piece, however, because - unlike Atwood’s Hag Seed, based on The Tempest, or Miller’s Song of Achilles, based on The Iliad - I can’t imagine anyone enjoying this work without having first read Th...

Happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked.”Booker prize winner, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad provides a clever and often sardonic window into Odysseus’ famous homecoming. The retelling, written from Penelope’s point of view, examines issues of gender and class in Bronze Age Greece. In the novella, Atwood adds to Homer’s tale by including Penelope’s backstory from Robert Graves’s Greek Myths. The stories of her youth and marriage to Odysseus add to the book’s charm and und...

We're the serving girls, we're here to serve you. We're here to serve you right.A short book, this is smart, funny and subversively clever as Atwood re-opens Homer's poems, especially The Odyssey, to give us a Penelope who speaks across time from a classical underworld but with a 21st century voice and hindsight to tell her own story.At the disturbing heart of this tale is the hanging of the twelve maids after Odysseus kills the suitors: a minor incident in Homer, but one which expands in Atwoo

This is incredibly short, and I still couldn't finish it. This is so overly simplistic in its language (was this written for high school audiences? I'm not even joking - that's a serious question) and the tone is super aggressive. I guess the excuse for that is because Penelope is writing this after her death (okay?), but it seems the whole purpose of the book is to spit venom at Odysseus as opposed to actually putting us in Penelope's shoes. The maids who were murdered after his return to Ithac...

Margaret Atwood gives us a reworked reinterpretation of Homer's The Odyssey that lends itself rather well to our present day in its contemporary echoes of our MeToo movement today. We have the abandoned for 20 years, but faithful Penelope learning to manage the court in the absence of her philandering husband. Numerous suitors come to court, Penelope commands the twelve maids, slaves in reality, to be used and abused, to deal with them. The inherently flawed Odysseus spent the first 10 years fig...

"we had no voice we had no namewe had no choicewe had one faceone face the same we took the blameit was no fairbut now w're herewe're all here toothe same as you"The truly successful myths are those that can be retold over and over from different angles and still speak to a contemporary audience with the same intensity as to past centuries. When Margaret Atwood picked up the story of Penelope and Odysseus, she kept all the familiar ideas, and yet - it is an entirely modern vision, and a modern v...

Tip; If you aren't familiar with (or have forgotten) this Greek myth don't read the introduction to this novel as it contains spoilers. I love the Greek myths (I must have mean streak!) but I had forgotten some of this. I would rather of been taken by surprise.A clever idea to feminise one of the most famous of these legends, but the start had some lazy writing; Where shall I begin? There are only two choices: at the beginning or not at the beginning. There is also that unfortunate whiff you