Tim's Updates en-US Sat, 05 Jul 2025 17:31:06 -0700 60 Tim's Updates 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Rating874510128 Sat, 05 Jul 2025 17:31:06 -0700 <![CDATA[Tim Preston liked a review]]> /
Tim Preston liked Kazango's review of Studies on the Early Papacy:
Studies on the Early Papacy by John Chapman
"A useful, helpful book which looks at the documentary history for the papacy. There is rather more Latin and a little Greek than the average modern reader can cope with, including me. More’s the pity, but this is not to be held against a century-old book whose intended audience was more scholarly. Even with this difficulty there is much here that is useful in defending the papacy against Protestant criticism. I found Chapman’s style to be engaging once I got used to it, and oddly enough it became a book that I couldn’t put down as I read more and more of it.

The largest part of the work deals with North Africa’s relation to Rome around the time of the Pelagian heresy. Chapman shows that the churches of North Africa expected the matter to be settled by appeal to the Pope. Another interesting chapter has to do with the Byzantine emperor Justinian and the Eastern Empire’s relationship to the Pope."
]]> Rating874509983 Sat, 05 Jul 2025 17:30:28 -0700 <![CDATA[Tim Preston liked a readstatus]]> /
Tim Preston liked Emily Stivers’s status update
Emily Stivers Emily Stivers started reading The Glass Palace
]]> Comment292420700 Sat, 05 Jul 2025 17:29:10 -0700 <![CDATA[Tim commented on Gail 's review of The Secret History]]> /review/show/7678072983 Gail 's review of The Secret History
by Donna Tartt

Strangely, I really enjoyed 'The Secret History' but have since tried a couple of Donna Tartt's subsequent novels but gave up on them. ]]> Rating874509092 Sat, 05 Jul 2025 17:26:26 -0700 <![CDATA[Tim Preston liked a userstatus]]> /
Tim Preston liked Lynne's status update
Lynne
Lynne is 61% done with Intermezzo: I went in with very low expectations after reading some of my favorite reviewers so I am hanging in there. Listening to the audio because I hate when authors do not use quotation marks. I don’t think this is an author for me but I keep giving g her another try. 🤣
]]> Comment292346226 Thu, 03 Jul 2025 07:50:08 -0700 <![CDATA[Tim commented on Erik's review of The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes]]> /review/show/2892382849 Erik's review of The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes
by Aeschylus

Thanks for your thoughts. Small point, but in Euripides' Helen, dosen't Menelaus come across Helen in Egypt, rather than 'in Greece'? Part of the plot is that the local ruler has a murderous hatred of Greeks, and would kill the marooned Greek King Menelaus if he realised who he was. ]]> Rating873776461 Thu, 03 Jul 2025 07:45:00 -0700 <![CDATA[Tim Preston liked a review]]> /
Tim Preston liked Erik's review of The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes:
The Greek Plays by Aeschylus
"I truly enjoyed many of these plays. Aeschylus' Persians is fascinating. Who would have guessed one of the first recorded plays in history would engender sympathy for a mortal enemy and be written from their point of view. While many attributes of the play belie the art form's lack of maturity (essentially one set, few characters, mostly dialog with "the chorus"), the point of view seems like something that would not have been tried for centuries. The Oresteia was interesting when taken as a trilogy. The first two plays--Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers, about the murders of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, respectively--seem rather barbaric, but the way the third, Eumenides, ends in a trial dismissing blind Justice and binding the gods to the city (Athens) is fascinating. The last play from Aeschylus is Prometheus Bound, another discussion on justice and a plea to get mankind out from under whimsical gods (fate). It would be interesting to find the rest of this trilogy.

From Sophocles, we get his entire classic trilogy of Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus, with Electra thrown in to close his take on the story of the house of Atreus. I was surprised how dramatic this felt despite everyone knowing the "twist" in Oedipus' story. Fate is an obvious theme to start, but justice comes up again as Oedipus stands between the struggle of his sons for power in Thebes in the end.

The book ends with quite a few works from Euripides. I have to admit I did not enjoy these nearly as much as those by Sophocles and Aeschylus. They are so odd. Alcestis is about a king, Admetus, who can live only if someone sacrifices their life for him, and it turns out to be his wife, Alcestis. Certainly an indecent bargain. This is followed by the barbaric Medea. I am not saying she was treated fairly, but to fulfill her vengeance on her sons just made me sick (and she seemed to be partly to blame for her situation, too). It was one of those stories that I found gripping but really did not want to see, like a Darren Aronofsky film. Hippolytus was not much better. This man tries so hard to be upright, and instead of being corrected, he is destroyed along with those around him by Aphrodite. This is where the gods seem so capricious. Are life, love, and the world in which we live really so tragic? His Electra isn't so bad, but I just read that one twice before. I am not sure how it is any better. I appreciate that Trojan Women calls out just how much women were pawns in this world of men, and for that, it is admirable, but in terms of dialogue, it seems to be 1300 lines of whining I did not enjoy reading. Helen is an interesting romantic intrigue, where Menelaus runs across Helen in Greece and makes a daring escape with her, but to me, limited in my exposure to ancient literature, it is a bit jarring, rewriting the storyline set out by Homer, claiming that Helen in Troy was nothing but an image made by the gods. Finally, I affirmed my dislike for Bacchae. Yuk. I do not like anything about this one. King Pentheus of Thebes seems to want to keep his city clear-headed. True, he could be said to be defying a god, but he seems less in defiance of the gods and more in doubt of the hype. Once again, as with Hippolytus, he does not learn to balance faith and reason and to respect the new gods but is instead shamed and destroyed, literally ripped apart--by his mother, no less--for his mistake. Is Dionysus in the right? Look as his mother, Agave, in the end, who is so proud of her independent work as a hunter until she realizes she is holding her own son's head. The entire city is brought low. Who is in the right here? What is the lesson? Should Dionysus receive any honor? I am confused.

All in all, though, this is a collection of sixteen works of great importance to the development of drama. Well worth the read. I have no idea how the translations stack up against others, but they generally read well and have copious footnotes. Also included are an introductory essay for each play and, in an appendix, five long essays (which I did not read) on Greek drama in general."
]]> Review7427204585 Thu, 03 Jul 2025 04:05:25 -0700 <![CDATA[Tim added 'The Heart's Invisible Furies']]> /review/show/7427204585 The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne Tim gave 3 stars to The Heart's Invisible Furies (Hardcover) by John Boyne
My 3 Star rating for John Boyne's 'The Heart's Invisible Furies' is a compromise. The first half, set in mid-20th Century Ireland, is very interesting, I cared about the characters, and it is worth reading on its own. However, I found the book as a whole too long. The later parts of the story, set in the Netherlands and other places in more modern times, are less interesting. I eventually skipped some chapters but read the last few to see how the story ended.

This novel traces the life of Cyril Avery from his mother's pregnancy (scandalous in her rural Catholic village in Ireland, as she is unmarried) through adoption by an eccentric intellectual couple in Dublin, to early old age. By then, Cyril, reunited with his elderly mother, visits the parish from which she was once cast out for the sin of being pregnant but unwed. They see the graves in the Churchyard of the relatives who disowned her, but no one of that extended family lives in the village now, all 'dispersed to the four winds or America'.

Cyril, in his formative years, gradually realises that there are such people as homosexuals, and then that he is one, although homosexual relations are then both illegal and unspeakable in Irish society, leading to a squalid sex life as a young man, brief, furtive liasons in public lavatories, and becoming engaged to the unsuspecting sister of the young man Cyril really wants to be with.

Over the decades, attitudes change so much that by the end of the book the people of the Irish Republic vote by a large margin in a Referendum to legalise gay marriage. Cyril, quite old now, celebrates a wedding to another man. So, the reader is left to think, a happy ending at last, not just for Cyril but for Ireland, in a new era of tolerance and freedom.

[Digression here. Actually, as so often, it is not that simple. To some extent, stuffy old intolerances have been replaced by trendy new ones. It can now be almost as fatal to a career and social acceptance to question the current orthodoxy that 'trans women are women' as it once was to question the Catholic Church's teaching on sexual morality. Also, the fashionable enthusiasm in modern Ireland for the Arabs to destroy Israel often boils over into hostility to Jews (see the first part of Tuvia Tenenbom 'The Taming of the Jew', written before the latest Gaza war, and Rachel Moiselle on X/Twitter more recently.)]

'The Heart's Invisible Furies' makes references to Irish politics of the time that readers in other countries may not understand. However, beyond knowing that the country was politically divided, it is unnecessary to know who WT Cosgrave, the Blueshirts or even De Valera were to appreciate this novel. ]]> Review7679794289 Thu, 03 Jul 2025 03:31:03 -0700 <![CDATA[Tim added 'The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and its Citrus Fruit']]> /review/show/7679794289 The Land Where Lemons Grow by Helena Attlee Tim gave 5 stars to The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and its Citrus Fruit (Hardcover) by Helena Attlee
You may not realise that you want to read a book on the history of citrus fruit in Italy, but you do.

Helena Attlee's 'The Land Where Lemons Grow' contains a wealth of interesting facts about the subject and the people she met, places she visited and citrus recipes she tried while researching it.

-Lemons became a major crop in Sicily at the beginning of the 19th Century to meet demand from the British Royal Navy, following the discovery that consuming the juice of Citrus fruit allowed crews to remain at sea for long periods without developing scurvy, a disease of Vitamin C deficiency brought on by lack of fresh fruit and vegetables after long periods at sea. Scurvy causes lethargy, blackened, split and swollen gums, teeth falling out and eventually death.

Sometimes prickly pear cactus was planted first as its tough roots broke up hard, rocky ground to make it ready to plant lemon trees 🌳.

In the 1860s the British Navy was persuaded to buy from within the British Empire, and switched from Sicilian 🍋 Lemons to West Indian Limes. The consequent daily ration of lime juice compulsory in the Royal Navy caused British sailors to be called 'Limeys' by American sailors.

However, the lemon growers of Sicily continued to thrive as the loss of that market coincided with the introduction of Ocean going steam ships, allowing Lemons to be transported quickly and reliably (important for a perishable cargo like fruit) to new markets in North America.

However, lemon trees, although lucrative, took several years to become fully productive and were easily damaged. Hence, lemon growers either had to be able to afford constant armed guards, or else were vulnerable to protection rackets, often run by larger landowners who could afford to employ 24 hour armed guards on their own trees and for an extorted fee would protect smaller scale lemon growers as well, whom they might otherwise muscle out of the business as potential competitors. Out of this protection racket grew the Sicilian Mafia, who diversified from lemons to other kinds of crime.

-The Bitter 🍊 Orange, which reached Europe centuries before the sweet Oranges we mainly know today, is little eaten now except in Marmalade, but its juice was a key ingredient of Renaissance Italian recipes. Bartolomeo Scappi, cook to Pope Pius V and 16th Century cookery writer, considered the juice of bitter oranges, mixed with a cocktail of spices, an essential ingredient of tortoise pie. He wrote that tortoises are juicier than turtles and best eaten in Autumn, and that the tortoise's body can live for up to a day after their head is cut off.

Gradually replaced by sweet Oranges, or by Lemons where a sharp flavour is required, Sour Oranges are today mostly used as root stocks on to which other citrus trees are grafted, so their distinctive scent is still often found in fruit groves if the soil around the trees' roots is disturbed.

A small bitter orange variety, the Chinotto, unique to Liguria in North-West Italy, crystallised and combined with various flavourings, is used to make a brown soft drink that Mussolini once hoped would be Italy's answer to Coca-Cola.

-The citron, a bright yellow fruit looking like a knobbly lemon, with far more peel and pith than juicy flesh, is now grown mostly to make candied peel, although it can be used in Marmalade or to flavour liqueur. It was the first citrus tree to reach the Mediterranean World from East Asia, in Ancient times. Initially it seems to have been grown for its perfume and ornamental appearance, and only eaten as a remedy by those who had consumed poison, to make them vomit up the poison.

However, the Citron (in Hebrew Etrog or Esrog) acquired symbolic importance at the Jewish Festival of Sukkot, or Tabernacles. Every year, black clad Orthodox Rabbis, perspiring in the heat, flock to northern Calabria, just above the toe of Italy, to ensure that Citrons, supplied at exorbitant prices for Sukkot, meet the exacting standards, including being totally unblemished and not grown from root stock, to be kosher.

-The Bergamot, a natural cross that arose in the 17th Century, does not seem to thrive anywhere but the West coast of southern Calabria, in a hot but often wet partly sheltered climate between mountains and sea. Almost inedible as a fruit, the Bergamot was originally grown only for ornament, because of its wonderful blossom. However, in time people found uses, principally for the oil that can be extracted from it, which has since the 18th Century been important in perfumes like Eau de Cologne, as well as the Bergamot flavoured Early Grey tea invented in Britain, although no one has convincingly explained what Earl Grey, Whig Prime Minister in the 1830s, personally had to do with it. ]]> Review5854659509 Tue, 01 Jul 2025 17:33:08 -0700 <![CDATA[Tim added 'The Silence of the Girls']]> /review/show/5854659509 The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker Tim gave 4 stars to The Silence of the Girls (Women of Troy, #1) by Pat Barker
Fictional memoir of ancient slavery, and the suffering and moral compromises it imposed on slaves, experienced by a young woman called Briseis, a character in Homer's ancient poem the Iliad. Briseis was part of the elite of her city until captured and enslaved by the Greeks in the legendary Trojan War. The legends say the same fate befell thousands of women, high born and low born, from many cities in that War.

This is a review of the Audiobook, read mainly by British (mostly theatre) actress and prolific, good Audiobook narrator Kristin Atherton, as Briseis (I also enjoyed her reading Natalie Haynes's 'Children of Jocasta' and [very different kind of book] Adele Parks' One Last Secret.)

A few chapters of Silence of the Girls are narrated by Briseis's owner, Achilles, read by a man. These make less impression.

Even so, there are experiences one gets from a paper copy but not an Audiobook, and vice versa. Looking at a copy of The Silence of the Girls in a bookshop, the beginning of each Chapter is decorated with little black bird silhouettes with outstretched wings, as though soaring on an air current. Are these to suggest slaves looking at the sky envying the birds who are free to fly where they please?

This book is very well written. I found it interesting, and usually, but not always, believeable, but so often bleak and distressing that, while glad I read this, I do not want to read another book like it.

The Silence of the Girls attracted great interest when published. However, reviews on podcasts and YouTube Channels often fail to warn potential readers of the distressing massacres, including of children, sexual violation and ugly squalor repeatedly referred to in the story, although fortunately not usually described too graphically, except to some extent in the conquest of Briseis's home city at the beginning.

This is presumably because videos and podcasts that mention the word I shall spell r@pə, in case 카지노싸이트 starts applying the same criteria, or murderous violence, are penalized in search rankings on video and podcast platforms. However, a responsible reviewer should surely at least warn potential readers that the novel includes distressing content the review will not go into, although not all do.

The authoress Pat Barker suggests the Greeks' determination to wipe out their enemies' male bloodlines included not just snatching little boys from their mothers' arms to be killed, but killing pregnant women by spearing them through the belly to slay the child inside them as well, in case the unborn child is male.

In what I found the most chilling line in the whole book, although few reviewers mention it, so I don't know if some miss its significance, after the fall of Troy, Briseis sees the helpless captured Trojan women and girls herded into the Greek camp, girls clinging fearfully to their mothers, but 'not one pregnant woman and no sons among them'. I am glad Pat Barker leaves it at that and does not describe the ruthless massacre this implies has just happened.

The 'sack' of a conquered city in those days must have been horrifying, and the later lives of those of the conquered whom the victors spared to be their slaves contained much misery. However, whether they were quite as bad as Pat Barker portrays I query, as explained near the end of this review. However, the authoress is combating both generations of male Classics professors, who accepted with little thought that in ancient fighting conquered women became 'prizes of war', without considering the enormous suffering this implies, and also some modern novelists who see the merciless mass killer and enslaver Achilles primarily as a romantic lover.

Among the very earliest Western literature are two epic poems, attributed to a poet called Homer, related to the Trojan War, the Iliad and Odyssey. Briseis is both very important in the Iliad, and very unimportant.

I see the World of Homer as about half way between barbarian and civilised, like the Vikings of early Medieval Europe.

Beautiful Briseis is in one way important in the Iliad because the poem concerns a feud between the Greek commander Agamemnon and Achilles over which of them should possess her as his bed slave. This causes Achilles for a long time to refuse to fight, with disastrous consequences for the Greek army.

Yet Briseis is in another way unimportant in the Iliad. The leading male characters argue at length as to which of them should own her, but no one asks or cares about Briseis's own opinion. She speaks once in the Iliad for about 19 lines out of many thousands in the poem, to mourn the death of Achilles' beloved friend Patroclus. However, this one time she speaks in the Iliad, as a slave, Briseis may not be free to say all she thinks.

Other ancient works tell us what became of most other significant characters in the Iliad after the end of that poem, but no surviving ancient work asks what happened to Briseis after the death of Achilles.

As a slave woman, even one who had been important in her earlier life, she only really matters when princes argued over her. Once that is settled, the literary record ignores her, to concentrate on what ancient authors and their audiences considered weightier matters than the fate of a mere female slave.

Pat Barker aims to give Briseis a voice.

There are a few, possibly deliberate, anachronisms, such as a military hospital (no record of these before Roman times), coins (not invented in Homer's day) and lemons (a fruit created by citrus crosses not known in the Mediterranean world until many centuries later).

Ms Barker follows the sequence of events in the Iliad, supplemented by other ancient sources like Sophocles' play Ajax. However, Homer only rarely tells us about the lives and feelings of the women enslaved in the war, so the novelist has to use imagination. Often she comes up with things I can believe happened. E.g. after the Greeks have sacked her city, killed its menfolk and enslaved her, Briseis recognises a belt or a cloak this or that Greek warrior is wearing as having been her father's or her brother's, which the Greeks have looted from their bodies or homes.

I don't know enough of textiles and detergents to know if it is true, but we are told the only way to get blood out of clothes then (a frequent problem in war) was to tread blood soaked garments in a vat of urine. While we don't know how such work was managed, such a foul task was probably given to slaves. The authoress imagines a communal laundry staffed by a gang of slave girls spending so many hours treading bloody clothes in a giant vat of urine that they permanently stink of it, although the unfortunate girls become so accustomed to the smell they may cease to notice it. The man in charge of them either also ceases to notice it, or else his lechery is stronger than his nose, as he treats the girls as his personal, urine scented, harem, and makes them have sex with him. No one misses him when he dies of plague.

Pat Barker bases the treatment of conquered women in this novel partly on reports of more recent, better documented, wars.

However, modern day military thugs rampaging across eastern Congo or Sudan have little incentive to care what happens to their victims after using them. In the Ancient World, however, a slave was a valuable piece of property. Just as it was not in an owner's interest to maltreat his horse so badly the horse died, or was so injured in mind or body that it lost usefulness and value, the same must have applied to slaves.

As for killing all the Trojan boys and pregnant women, I think that comes from a single blood-curdling speech by Agamemnon in Book 6 of the Iliad. Characters in Homer sometimes say things in the heat of the moment or for rhetorical effect not to be taken literally. In a society without modern contraceptives, at any one time a high proportion of the women in Troy were likely pregnant. I doubt the Greeks really killed so many potentially valuable slaves.

Given how badly women are treated in this novel, I am surprised how many of the 5 Star reviews of Silence of the Girls are by women. However, I understand many female readers like that the book puts women's experiences at the centre of the story, even if those experiences are awful. Some female reviewers admit to crying over Silence of the Girls.

Likewise, I am surprised by the number of reviewers who say they love this book and also love the Iliad. They can resolve the contradiction in their minds that much that in the Iliad is heroic, here is cruel and squalid, perhaps by thinking of them in different mental compartments.

Note: If you remain interested in the subject of women affected by the Trojan War, going back to the Ancient sources there is Sophocles's play Ajax or Aiax, in which Tecmessa has an important part and several of Euripides's plays. Of modern works Natalie Haynes's book 'A Thousand Ships' is good, funny in places, tragic in others, and retells the stories of many of the women, Trojan, Greek, Amazon and Goddesses.

If you want a more light-hearted modern take on Ancient Greek Mythology more generally, I am currently enjoying Marie Phillips's 'Gods Behaving Badly', in which she imagines the Olympian gods in modern London. ]]> Review7524772356 Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:59:46 -0700 <![CDATA[Tim added 'The Children of Jocasta']]> /review/show/7524772356 The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes Tim gave 5 stars to The Children of Jocasta (Hardcover) by Natalie Haynes
This story begins with a young lady in a palace describing how a mysterious intruder comes close to assassinating her with a knife. Gradually, we learn that the young lady is called 'Issy', short for Ismene, and how she and this incident fit into the tragic story of the Oedipus family of Ancient Greek myth, told from the point of view of two characters not usually given the most prominent roles: King Oedipus's wife Queen Jocasta and younger daughter Ismene.

I listened to the Audiobook of this enjoyable novel by Natalie Haynes, read by British actress Kristin Atherton, my favourite Audiobook reader.

Not Natalie Haynes's first book and probably not her best of all, but her first novel for adults to be set, like most of her work, fiction and nonfiction, in Ancient Greece, and it is a good one.

Although Ms Haynes used to be a stand up comedian, and humour often features even in her more 'serious' recent talks, this novel, based mainly on ancient tragic plays, shows a different side to Natalie's talents. There are no jokes. It is, however, very well-written, has a good story, creates characters I cared about, and despite the disasters that befall them, ends on a slight note of hope. Even if being a novelist is Natalie H's third or fourth career, she has a flair for it.

People mostly know of Oedipus, legendary King of Thebes, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, either from the psychoanalyst Freud's theory of the Oedipus Complex or from ancient dramatist Sophocles's tragedies Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. Another part of the story of this troubled family is contained in Aeschylus's play Seven Against Thebes, in which Oedipus's two sons, supposed to share the throne but unwilling to do so, fight to the death of them both.

A version of the Oedipus myth, in which his wife is called Epicaste rather than Jocasta, is mentioned near the very beginning of extant Greek (and European) literature, in Homer's Odyssey. Where different accounts of the same myth survive from ancient times, there are usually substantial differences between them. Consequently, it does not do to be purist about the myths. We should not be too put out that Ms Haynes makes changes to Sophocles' story, as Sophocles did to his predecessors'. Natalie H at least respects, and has studied, the Ancient sources in the original Greek.

Either in keeping with her own 'humanist' beliefs or to keep the story focused on the human characters, other than the prophecy that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother, and the fact the gods are said to be angry when he does so, the authoress leaves out most elements of the supernatural from the myths.

Thus, instead of the Sphinx, from whom Oedipus saves the city, being a half man, half lion creature who poses riddles and has the power to bring plague, here it is the name of a gang of robbers. The seer Teiresias from the plays is replaced as a wise old character by Ismene's old tutor Sophon. There are other changes that those familiar with the myths will notice as they read.

The book alternates chapters told from the points of view of Jocasta, when Ismene is a child, and, years later, by Ismene as a teenager or an adult. At first this confused me. I wish the authoress had done as some other novelists do when using multiple narrators, and headed each Chapter with the name of the character telling that part of the story or on whom the chapter is centred (or, for an Audiobook, having different narrators.)

As it is, we are meant to tell the difference by noticing that chapters alternate being told in the first person [by Ismene] and in the third person [about Jocasta], and to work out from the circumstances that Ismene's chapters must be set years after Jocasta's. Kristin Atherton reading the Audiobook does not alter her voice or accent between them to help the reader spot the difference, although she gives some other characters different voices (Oedipus, who grew up in Corinth, when the other characters grew up in Thebes, she distinguishes by making him sound as though from Yorkshire).

Additional slight confusion comes from the fact that while, in the chapters about Jocasta, her children are called by their full names, Ismene, Antigone etc., in Ismene's chapters these are abbreviated, as they might be between brothers and sisters, to 'Issy', 'Ani' etc. (She avoids 'Tiggy' for Antigone, which a few girls are known as in modern Britain.)

Some Audiobooks of Natalie Haynes's works she reads herself (a reviewer of the Audiobook of 'A Thousand Ships' says that the authoress can be heard crying as she reads one passage). Others are read by actresses. I don't know why Ms Haynes records some herself but not others. Smooth voiced Kristin Atherton, who read this one, also narrated the Audiobook for another, more stark and brutal, Greek Myth retelling, Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls. I have also heard her read some of Adele Parks' modern novels. She has apparently voiced video games and played various stage and, less often, screen roles.

I am frustrated that I did not do a better job here explaining why I like Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta and Kristin Atherton, but they are all good. ]]>