A wonderfully condensed reflection on Penelope's story. Highly readable and very insightful - I especially liked the Maids. Whilst each chapter dedicated to the Maids story differed in style, it was still a distinctive yet indistinguishable voice. I especially loved Atwood's subversive comments on women's freedom, as it seems that Penelope gained more freedom in death yet still chose to remember.

A beautiful reflection on Penelope's story. I came away not knowing quite who to believe: was Penelope as faithful as they say? Was her story the 'true' telling of events? After all, she says her and Odysseus are both liars. The glimpses of Penelope's time in the underworld were particularly poignant. I also loved the nods to Greek Drama with the action interposed with the dead maids as a Greek chorus.

I thought The Penelopiad was very good. I approached it with some trepidation, but it was readable, insightful and very funny in places.

This is the myth of Odysseus's wife, narrated by her shade in Hades in the present day. As you'd expect, it has Margaret Atwood's wry, intelligent feminist take on the story. Penelope has rather an ironic, world-weary voice which does become very funny in places. I could almost imagine her doing a stand-up routine about this, and it makes the book very readable, while making some very serious points. Atwood is very good at highlighting the role and mythologizing of the perfect wife for the male fantasy it is, but this is also concerned with class. She is very concerned with the fate of the twelve serving maids who were hanged on Odysseus's return for consorting with Penelope's suitors. They were "just" low-born or slave women who didn't really count for anything and they are neatly brought to life as the Chorus who periodically comment on the story in the manner of Greek tragedy. It's a clever device which makes the points about male hypocrisy and the story's disdain for ordinary lives very well.

I found the actual verse of the Chorus a bit mixed; some was very good, some less successful, but overall this is a readable and thoughtful book which I can recommend.

(My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley.)

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 Atwood's hands to speak volumes about class, gender, violence. But what's most interesting is not just the commentary on possessive masculinity where women and slaves are owned, but the unwitting complicity of Penelope in this act. Through her silence, through her deliberate withholding of information in her own struggle for power and control in the household, she becomes complicit in this act of violent retribution, one which haunts her eternally.

Despite this sombre event, so much of the text is lit with a sceptical, sharp, self-deprecating humour, partly in Penelope's own voice ('the best that was claimed of Menelaus, once they started putting him into the poems, was that he had a very loud voice', p.32) but also in the dazzling array of modes taken by the chorus of hanged maids: they sing, they recite, they act out a trial scene, they play with old-school musicals, and they threaten. Most pressingly, at the end, they become a voice for voiceless women across history who have been raped, coerced, violated and murdered - but it's not a voice of victimhood but of revenge: We're the serving girls, we're here to serve you. We're here to serve you right - the maids perform a version of the Erinyes.

As with her more recent Hag-Seed: The Tempest Retold, Atwood wears her scholarship lightly as she accommodates a multiplicity of versions of Penelope's story, taking account of interpretations from the anthropological (e.g. in Graves' The Greek Myths) to both traditional and modern feminist scholarly readings. For all that, this is a lively, energetic enterprise - if you know Homer and the other sources for this story well then it slightly slows down in the middle but overall this is a darkly humorous take on the sources, that seizes on the residual subversion that is already implicit in Homer and expands it into something transgressive and self-aware.

The Penelopiad is Margaret Atwood’s retelling of the story of Penelope, the famously patient wife of Odysseus. She takes elements of Homer’s Odyssey and other versions of Penelope’s story and new perspectives on these myths and weaving them together in a way fitting for Penelope and her infamous weaving and unpicking to create a tale of sex, violence, lies, and mistakes.

This is a rich, enjoyable retelling that only really requires a passing knowledge of Odysseus and Penelope to read, though it fits nicely into the world of Greek myth retellings and what they can tell us about the original texts and about our contempory culture. The style is poetic, much like other of Canongate’s ‘Myths’ books, and by reissuing The Penelopiad as part of their Canons series, they highlight the relevance of this story to the modern day, full of female consent and lack of consent, agency and lack of agency.