From Madeline Miller’s CIRCE to Vaishnavi Patel’s KAIKEYI, the hot literary ticket right now is a retelling of mythological villainesses’ stories. Offering these maligned women a chance to tell their own tales --- and extricate themselves from the often-misogynistic slant in which they were originally regarded --- is exciting and intriguing.

Jennifer Saint has succeeded with this trope, releasing the bestseller ARIADNE in 2021. Now, she has returned with ELEKTRA, retelling the stories of the murderous Queen Clytemnestra, her equally bloodthirsty daughter Elektra, and the tragic Trojan princess Cassandra (not really a villain).

"Saint does a wonderful job of bringing to life Clytemnestra’s heartwrenching and paralyzing grief over Iphigenia’s death, showing how she lost not just her daughter, but her entire life as she knew it."

Elektra’s story is one that been reinvented in ancient tragedy but has often flown under the radar in modern novelizations. What is confusing, though, is that she lends her name to this book, but her story is only about a third of the novel. Perhaps ELEKTRA should have been called “Women Whom Agamemnon Screwed Over,” in reference to the duplicitous King of Mycenae, who chose to sacrifice Iphigenia, his daughter, with Clytemnestra. The queen spends the years her husband is at Troy plotting her vengeance and ultimately wreaks havoc on him. Agamemnon also wronged Cassandra, whom he enslaves after the conquest of Troy, while Elektra adores her brutal but absent father and obsesses over how she can avenge his death.

Saint does a wonderful job of bringing to life Clytemnestra’s heart-wrenching and paralyzing grief over Iphigenia’s death, showing how she lost not just her daughter, but her entire life as she knew it. She similarly brings to vivid life Elektra’s obsession over her father, both when he was alive and once he is dead. No matter how much all three women try, their worlds wind up revolving around men because men are the ones who are able to be agents of change --- for better or worse --- in society.

ELEKTRA struggles to tell each woman’s story in full; Cassandra is a blip on the radar compared to the emotional depth given to Clytemnestra and Elektra. But even the latter two are only shown in one light --- as women obsessed with men and their own grief, to the exclusion of all else. As a result, while we do see the parallels between mother and daughter’s tragic journeys, we mostly get one facet of each woman’s character (Clytemnestra is on the page, and her emotional reactions are a bit more nuanced than Elektra’s).

Perhaps the book would have benefited from homing in on one character and expanding on her journey in all its nuances, rather than attempting to encompass three divergent individuals in one.