3.5 STARS

I marked this as 4 stars as I’d rather give it a higher rating on GoodReads because, boy, was this a rollercoaster of emotions. The Silence of the Girls tells the story of Briseis, queen-turned-slave during the Trojan war after the fall of her city to the hands of the Greeks. This book wishes to tell the story of the Trojan war through the eyes and experiences of the women who suffered of it, rather than the men who caused it, and works through Briseis’ life in the war camp, as the slave of the man who murdered her entire family.
I think I was meant to read retellings, and specifically greek mythology retellings and that this was my life’s most joyful something. My favorite genre of stories, told through the lens of a woman whose story is so often forgotten, pushed aside in favour of the Great heroes of the war, and this was a refreshingly feminist novel, although, somewhere along the lines, I became increasingly interesting in Achilles’ character rather than Briseis.
It is also almost impossible to not compare it to the other Trojan war retelling The Song of Achilles for the simple reason that they are both set in the same time, and have the same goal of uncovering the forgotten stories of this period of history. Pat Baker does a relatively good job at the story-telling and it is rather easy to understand Briseis’ despair, as she went from having an entire city bend at her orders to being the one to serve the men in the camp. It’s a story of grief, of pain, of the horrors of war and the condition of women, and I think it was as beautifully told, as it was painful.