Phaedra

 

Phaedra-Laura Shepperson

Alcove Press/Penguin Random House

Release Date: January 10, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚

Trigger Warning: Rape, violence, suicide

Synopsis: Phaedra has been cast to the side all her life: daughter of an adulteress, sister of a monster, and now unwilling bride to the much-older, power-hungry Theseus. Young, naïve, and idealistic, she has accepted her lot in life, resigned to existing under the sinister weight of Theseus’s control and the constant watchful eye of her handsome stepson Hippolytus. 

When supposedly pious Hippolytus assaults her, Phaedra’s world is darkened in the face of untouchable, prideful power. In the face of injustice, Phaedra refuses to remain quiet any longer: such an awful truth demands to be brought to light. When Phaedra publicly accuses Hippolytus of rape, she sparks an overdue reckoning.
 
The men of Athens gather to determine the truth. Meanwhile, the women of the city, who have no vote, are gathering in the shadows. The women know truth is a slippery thing in the hands of men. There are two sides to every story, and theirs has gone unheard. Until now.

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As a fan of Natalie Haynes, I enjoy giving mythological retellings a chance- seeing Greek, Norse, etc. stories from more feminist perspectives and bringing to life the women who were left in the silent shadows of the original stories has lots of potential. Phaedra is a story that had lots of potential, but never quite lived up to it for me. A lot of it was the writing style. Despite having multiple POVs- many, many characters tell this story- all of them sound exactly the same. There is virtually no way of differentiating any of the voices if you just closed your eyes and opened to a page. There is almost no character development among the characters, including the main women, Phaedra and Medea, although I had high hopes for Medea and personally thought some of her scenes were among the best in the book. Phaedra starts out as a young and naive princess who ends up married to Theseus and is in Athens really as a hostage instead of a wife. She is sure she is supposed to witness the gods' justice against the terrible wrongs Theseus has done on Crete. There is hatred in her early on, but that gets banked and we don't get to see it again until pretty much the end. The rest of the time she's . . . not much. You'd think she couldn't be as naive as she acts sometimes, that she'd figure out her status doesn't save her from the terrible things that happen in the Athenian palace. But she never seems to change, or to grow up from the girl we first meet.

When she accuses Hippolytus of rape and the statesman Trypho convinces her to bring it to trial, the modern reader sees plenty of the MeToo movement trying to rise up in ancient Athens. The problem being, of course, women have no voice in ancient Athens and the men who will do the voting are the men who are behaving just the same to the servants in the palace. Maybe Phaedra's status will mean something to them, maybe not. One of the most realistic and heartbreaking scenes in the book is between Phaedra and Theseus when he comes to ask her to stop the trial before his son can be judged. After all, why should his life be ruined because she suffered for a few minutes? It made me want to cry and be sick at the same time, because you know this was genuinely how this man understood the situation, and how generations since have and still do think.

By the end of the book we see the limited choices women in this world have: the vast majority, the 'night chorus', choose to silently accept the violence done to them and find small ways of avoiding the worst of it-working in pairs, putting sleeping draughts in men's wine, moving in shadows to avoid being seen. Medea has made choices others condemn her for, but she believes were right. What will Phaedra choose?

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review