Well it depends on what part of the book you’re reading because this answer is as unpredictable as the Sea God’s mood. This is set years later, when the full truth of what happened has been forgotten and all that’s left is suffering. It’s the bittersweet sort of sad, where there is hope for the future, but the characters aren’t going to get that in the way they were expecting. Anyway, if you want a feminist version of The Odyssey written by a female Homeric scholar that’s been studying for literal decades, read The Odyssey translation by Emily Wilson. She obtained her MEng in Computational Bioengineering at Imperial College, London, and recently graduated with her MPhil in Population Health Sciences at the University of Cambridge.

It's a sequel slash spinoff that could honestly be set in an entirely different universe and it would make no difference, which is why I won't touch the "she didn't read the Odyssey" thing. Mathias is the Greek form of Matthew, not something that a 4th century BCE pagan prince of Ithaca would be named. Gorgeous, tragic, and timeless, Underwood’s LIES WE SING TO THE SEA makes an age-old story feel new again.

My whole community of friends who love Ancient Greece are literally all queer/trans, and we unilaterally agree this is awful. The writing is easy to read, not particularly descriptive or lyrical but clear and interesting wording. Certain scenes contradict each other and plot revelations are even repeated, as if the characters and the readers weren’t already aware!

Reading the wikipedia page for Theseus or Achilles or the History of Athens would reveal these facts. She angrily stares the prince in the face as he wrongly condemns her to die, and that’s the last we really see of a personality except that she’s really mad and impatient at some points and made of wood every other time. As for the setting and the retelling, there are names from the Odyssey, stories and myths from it, but the story could be set anywhere. As someone who has studied Hellenic culture and history, including the Homeric epics, in my free time as a curiosity, it’s beyond reproach that this author delights in the fact that she never read The Iliad or The Odyssey before writing this retelling.

Achilles and Patroclus are quite famous, and Zeus and Ganymede, but lesbian and queer women relationships were not really ‘allowed. When the kiss happens, they are sharing a bed (not by choice, it’s a ‘only one bed trope’ situation– something Melantho’s inner monologue previously mentioned made her uncomfortable. So that's proof I'm not policing morality or anything, I just demand a logical setup and clear character motivations. At various points in the book it is implied or outright stated that everyone on Ithaca knows of the yearly sacrifice, that no one really knows about it, and that word of the sacrifices has spread across the Mediterranean. A reclamation of a story from thousands of years ago, Lies We Sing to the Sea is about love and fate, grief and sacrifice, and, ultimately, the power we must find within.