Reviews with content warning for Torture - The Silence of the Girls

The silence of the girls wasn’t badly written and was easy enough to get into reading.

However, can publishers and marketing teams stop pushing the term “feminist retelling” onto books that are so clearly NOT a feminist retelling? That is my biggest issue with this book. If the book had been done differently, it had the potential to be a feminist retelling. But trying to focus a bit more on the women in a story that is male dominated and being unsuccessful at focusing on the women and their own lives does NOT make a book a feminist retelling. That is my main gripe with this book.

So if you’re looking for a feminist retelling of Greek mythology, this is not it. Otherwise it was an okay book.

Content Warnings

indigoimpulse's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

i actually really liked the fact that briseis wasn’t a perfect character and that she’s so judgemental of others around her, men and women alike - i feel like given her circumstances you can’t exactly expect her to act like a saint . her narration was very raw which i found gave her personality .

however the book promised me a story from briseis’ pov so i didn’t really appreciate so much of the book being taken up by achilles’ pov - this author writes grief excellently so his sections were great but it kind of took away from the fact that this was supposed to be briseis’ story . i don’t really think you can call this a feminist novel but i enjoyed it nonetheless

Content Warnings

babblingbooks's review against another edition

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dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

Content Warnings

sullyvan's review against another edition

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dark informative sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

Content Warnings

kttylatte's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional reflective sad tense

4.25

i can’t put into words how beautiful yet saddening this book was. barker manages to write in such an amazing way, and directly speaks to the audience too which i love. because of her writing, i felt sympathy for achilles, even after reading about how much of a horror he was. there’s nothing more i love than a retelling of a greek myth from the perspective of a woman!

Content Warnings

preciouslittleingenue's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I have very complicated feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is very much a self-proclaimed woman-centered retelling of the horrific realities that everyone glosses over of war in general and ancient war in particular. But on the other hand...it is simply not entirely woman-centered. Because about a third of the book is written from Achilles's point of view. You know. The man who is the abductor and rapist of the main character. I cannot for the life of me fathom why this was done. It left a very sour taste in my mouth when I heard a man introduce himself as one of the audiobook narrators. Because in this story, the way that Pat Barker acts like she intended for it to be, there should be NO men at the center, EVER. Barker literally undermines and undoes her own entire point for writing this novel. And I'm not the only one who thinks this. It boggles the brain.

To add more insult to injury on that front: I didn't write down any specifics, but there were deliberate references to Achilles and Patroclus's story as a romance, and perhaps even a "this is not a romance, it's a horror story" type line. I definitely got the vibe that this and other similar lines were meant to throw shade at The Song of Achilles (published 2012, while TSOTG is published 2018). It was truly almost like Barker read TSOA and had a direct, visceral reaction, which came out in the form of TSOTG. Except...she did the exact same thing that she seems to hold Miller in such contempt for. If Barker hated that Miller made the bloody, horrific, women-torture machine that was the Trojan war into a soft, tragic romance, and by doing so took away from the reality and the tragedy of the women's suffering...then why was Achilles a main character with point of view? Why was Briseis silenced by the author in her own story? Nearly every single detail of plot that Achilles POV provided could have been Briseis. It's incredibly frustrating. Every time it cut away to Achilles, I could not wait to hear more about the women. Especially since this was written after TSOA, there is ENOUGH about his relationship to Patroclus and his grief over losing him. I don't care in the context of a book called The Silence of THE GIRLS. THE GIRLS. If Barker wanted to share with everyone her headcanon that Achilles has mommy issues...put that in another book and don't make me read disturbing passages about it that are used to facilitate rape in a story that's meant to be ABOUT THE GIRLS AND WOMEN.

Don't get me wrong. If Barker had written this as direct shade to TSOA, made all those references about how it's wrong to categorize the Trojan War tales as anything but bloody, rape-filled horror, and kept it woman-centered, I would have nothing to say. I recognize that TSOA, for all its poignant beauty, is man-centered. But the hypocrisy of seemingly wanting to "do better" than that and then literally doing almost the exact same, while claiming you're not...idk man it's a little too much hypocrisy for me. Really really bothers me.

Anyway. Now that that's out of the way, I don't regret reading this. Despite Barker's large misstep, it does shed light on a lot of things we often try not to think about when we think about the Trojan war and war-glory stories in general. The first five or so chapters were really. Hard. To get through. I thought I would have to DNF it, truly. Especially because I was so brainwashed by the gorgeous and soft telling by Miller. But once I got over that and learned what to expect, I was glad I hadn't put it down. Not that it got less horrific. Not at all.

Below the spoiler tabs I have listed the quotes that I absolutely had to write down that just sat like a punch to the gut. The absolute senselessness of war. The complete and utter hubris and idiocy of men, every single one of them. The beautiful enduring power of women, even tortured and/or about to be murdered. The way men literally don't think women are people. Lines that I just otherwise found hauntingly beautiful and poignant.

Chapter 3: “I didn’t feel like anything that might have a name.”

Chapter 5: “[My brothers] belonged neither with the living, nor the dead. Which I felt was also true of me.”

Chapter 5: “I seemed to be living in a bubble. No past, no future, only an endless repetition of now, and now, and now.”

Chapter 17: “Men carve meaning into women’s faces, messages addressed to other men.”

Chapter 18: “Poor Helen; raped on a riverbank when she was only ten. Of course I believed her. It was quite a shock to me later to discover no one else did.”

Chapter 18: Priam being so sweet to Briseis, doing magic tricks with a coin.

Chapter 18: “Looking back, I wonder if my dumpy, plain sister wasn’t slightly in love with Helen. I was probably a little in like with her myself.”

Chapter 34: “But you see the problem, don’t you? How on earth can you feel any pity or concern confronted by this list of intolerably nameless names?” … and the subsequent meetings Briseis had with the women of Troy who’d become slaves, reminiscing about their dead sons, so powerful.

Chapter 39: “A lot of him went onto the fire with Patroclus. Because what isn’t shared ceases to seem quite real. Perhaps ceases even to be real.” The only Achilles POV line I included because it speaks to grief very truthfully. Could have been used by Briseis in the context of losing her family/all of Troy. Because again. Who cares about Achilles and Patroclus in this story.

Chapter 42: “ ‘I do what no man before me has ever done: I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.’ -- Those words echoed around me as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles has plundered from burning cities. I thought, and I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband, and my brothers. --That was the lowest point for me.” This was just completely unbelievable and sickening. Literally felt like a gut punch. Men just have no. Idea. Not a single clue.

Chapter 44: “I looked down at my body. I put both hands on my belly and thought how totally this flesh, this intricate mesh of bone and nerve and muscle belonged to me. In spite of Achilles.” YES BITCH. SO POWERFUL. LOVED THIS.

"...listening to a slave sing a Trojan lullaby to her Greek baby. And suddenly I understood something; glimpsed, rather. I don't think I understood it until much later. I thought: we're going to survive. Our songs, our stories. They'll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We'll be in their dreams. And in their worst nightmares too." Full body chills. Anything with a "we will survive" sentiment always does that to me. Incredible.

Chapter 47: “ ‘Better to die on Achilles burial mound,’ I heard her say, ‘than live, and be a slave.’ -- Oh, these fierce young women.” I could just cry.

“[Cassandra] was a virgin priestess of Apollo…Incredibly, Agamemnon chose her as his prize. God knows why. Perhaps he felt he hadn’t offended Apollo enough.” Unbelievable. Stupid piece of shit motherfucker.

All that said...if it weren't for the Achilles POV, this could be a solid 4/5 or 4.5/5. But given how uncomfortable it made me and how ineffective and hypocritical it was...the Achilles POV takes it down to a 3. Won't be rereading, won't be purchasing for my shelf. And I feel no need to read either of the two sequels. But I am glad I read it.

Content Warnings

risaleel's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

annasbookreviews's review against another edition

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adventurous dark sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

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