For what, exactly, is not clear, but the anger she bears will eventually lead her to beg for her own death in Clytemnestra’s arms. Cassandra inflects her anger inward she carries the injustice that Apollo put upon her as a kind of self-deserving punishment, which is perhaps the only actually crazy thing about her the visions that leave her writhing on the ground are clearly meant as Apollo’s revenge (for something that I shouldn’t like to spoil), but they are also a marker of how she refuses to forgive herself. What these women have in common, despite their well-distinguished perspectives, is anger, and through them we see three different ways in which this emotion is processed. There is no mistaking which remarkable woman is which. From Elektra, we feel the loneliness and yearning of a young girl abandoned, emotionally and literally, by her parents from Clytemnestra, we feel angry weariness, cold and calculating, as she waits for Agamemnon to return from Cassandra, we feel the anguish of head-splitting visions sent by Apollo that are believed by no one.

Despite the fact that all three women are stuck in relatively similar situations (waiting for the return of their husbands and fathers from the Trojan War), their experiences are wonderfully differentiated through their attitudes and emotions toward the world around them. But in Elektra, this is far from the case. I have struggled with split-perspective narratives in the past because it often seems like an author’s writing style permeates every aspect of each character, making characters’ voices difficult to differentiate from the writer’s own. The twists and turns of the plot itself are not so shocking-we are, after all, reading a story thousands of years old-but the vividness of each woman’s thoughts and emotions create a most compelling narrative. Throughout the novel, we follow three women: Elektra, daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, yearning for her father’s return from war Clytemnestra, struggling with her Agamemnon’s moral character and its meaning and Cassandra, a Trojan princess and sister of the man who begins the ten-year Trojan War, beset with prescient visions that discredit her beyond all reputability. And for a story that is predominantly about waiting-for husbands to return from war, for brothers to grow up, for men to come to their senses (spoiler: that never happens)-I turned the pages awfully quickly. Elektra reanimates the ancient tale of the Trojan War with new perspectives, zeroing in on the experiences of three female characters with elegance and emotional intensity.

But it is tragic in the best way possible. Like any good Greek tragedy, Jennifer Saint’s latest mythological retelling is exactly that-tragic.

Elektra saint