Lies We Sing to the Sea

i really enjoyed this book, i loved the three main characters and while the ending was sad it was also very beautiful and felt like the right way to end this story...


also i just want to address everyone who gave this book a bad rating on this website before it was even released, just because of one interview where the author said she had not read the entire odyssey: guess what, it doesn't matter, you don't need to know the entire epos for this story. actually, you don't need to know it at all. i think it's enjoyable either way. also please do not come along with cultural appropriation or whatever, this is not applicable here at all.

i sincerely wish you would just read this book with an open mind without being so set on hating it from the beginning and without nitpicking the author's every word, misinterpreting her on purpose and writing hateful reviews. it is an awful pile-on here on goodreads and i absolutely hate that it's targeted at the one more recent sapphic story set in ancient greece that we got during this whole hype around ancient greece in literature. if the marketing tried to go for the whole “odyssey” retelling schtick then this is NOT the author's fault, publishers love doing that kind of misleading marketing all the time. just read the book or don't.

at heart this is a lovely sapphic story filled with a lot of love and compassion and i do recommend it.

It's a good book loosely based on events in The Odyssey, but takes place over a hundred years after The Odyssey and is not an Odyssey retelling. If the author had not done that interview I don't think it would have been obvious that she's never finished reading the Odyssey. Despite the numerous weird things the author said in that interview, the book is pretty good for a debut novel but doesn't really stand out against any other Greek myth based novel.

This was a very good book that speaks to loss and love in a way that I think everyone can experience. The understanding that in a moment of grief, pain, and injustice what your heart may seek will not bring you the relief that you seek, but can instead inflict your pain on so many others was very well illustrated. Parts of this book were a bit slower, and other sections moved very quickly. Overall I would recommend it!

Excuse me, but did the author actually admit to not reading the source material in its entirety?

Here's the actual quote from the author:

“I read a lot of the stories within The Odyssey, because they're in things like Percy Jackson, and those little books of mythology you get as a kid, but I actually started and finished writing without sitting down and reading the whole thing. I have various translations; there are parts that are very beautiful and readable, but it's so long, and written in a ‘prose-y' way that's kind of impenetrable” (read the whole interview here).

The Odyssey

Percy Jackson