Greek Myths: A New Retelling, with drawings by Chris Ofili

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And what a fitting ending you gave us with the trial of Orestes and the reasoning of Penelope – am I expected to be a human version of Odysseus’ loyal dog Argos?

There are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures, resourceful witches and the origins of birds and animals. What a way to revisit The Odyssey and turning her loyalty to Odysseus into something more authentic and powerful. Theirs' are the hands which are responsible for piecing together the elaborate and imaginative tapestry that exists to make sense of the world. In other occasions, while explaining one myth, the author will suddenly jump to another, give it one paragraph, and the go back to the first one in the same sentence, making it quite difficult to full concentrate on what’s going on. She has served as a judge for the Art Fund museums prize, the Contemporary Art Society award, and the Royal Philharmonic Society awards.If you want to read an actual female academic’s translation of Greek text (spoiler: THIS IS NOT THAT BOOK) please go read Emily Wilson and exalt her work on high. Arachne who shows us the true ugliness of the gods, and in the end still loses to Athena (who honestly sucks). A the death of their king and his daughter the Corinthians started rioting; they were a mob, terrifying in their cries for vengeance.

That said, it is easy to read and some parts of prose are clearly very inspired by Ancient Greek poetic voice (but the writing is, at the same time, quite clunky in parts — almost like it reads in translation. A lot of the women were raped, which was to be expected in a book about Greek mythology; however, I think a lot of substance was missing from those aspects. Each chapter is dedicated to a woman using weaving to tell their own story and stories that they’ve heard. This is a stunning book complete with illustrations by Chris Ofili, and I highly recommend the hardback because of the artwork. My favourite is the story of Arachne’s weaving contest with Athene when the misguided mortal tells Athena, “Explain it to me: the gods make laws for humans, and then refuse to follow those same laws themselves.Occasionally, we hear what pictures they created – Helen at Troy weaves scenes from the very war she is said to have caused – but more often we do not.

There were names and stories from my childhood I'd forgotten about and it was brought back to life through Charlotte's retelling. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. This technique is powerfully employed by Charlotte Higgins to play on the intertexuaoity of these stories, on the notion of women weaving their own stories and as a brilliant way of introducing the ways in which these women reflect on the stories they themselves would have known. He didn't tell her that after the pair escaped from Crete they put in for the night on the island of Naxos.Athena, Alcithoë, Philomela, Arachne, and the Homeric weavers Andromache, Helen, Circe and Penelope function as Higgins’ quasi-narrators, except that the stories they tell are depicted on their looms’ warp and weft and described by the ninth Muse in this collection, Higgins herself.