Greek Myths: A New Retelling, with drawings by Chris Ofili

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Potters designing intricate stick people, chariots and funeral biers on geometric pottery produced at the time of the early bards copied their grid-templates from women’s weaving patterns.

It asks the reader to think about not only the female perspective on their stories, but their experience of living them. What the Greeks really wanted, all along, was Troy's wealth They wanted the treasuries of her temples emptied out, her women lined up and shared out-soft bodies on which to vent their rage and greed.Within each weaving/chapter, the stories are many of those familiar to us already, the Trojan War/ Odyssey, Persephone, Arachne and Athena (that one was particularly well written), and some are far more obscure (the rise of Dionysus and his many many side adventures). Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Appollonius, Robert Graves, Stephen Fryers and now Charlotte Higgins. Roman authors self-consciously played on the etymological relationship between “text” and “textile”.

I assure it is not, and I’m tired of authors thinking that an overuse of the word “rape” will mark their books as such. A young woman and her sister, Procne who long to be birds to explore the world around them, but Procne's husband has other terrible ideas about Philomela.So, while the timeline does jump around a bit, it does help you to see the characters that you might recognise from other myths and how they relate to the older ones. It deserves so much praise, and I will be posting overviews of some of my thoughts (none of which are concise) over the coming weeks on a per chapter basis.