12 Mar Book Review: The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

There are countless retellings of The Iliad, but most of them focus on the great warriors—Achilles, Hector, Odysseus—the men whose names have echoed through history. The Silence of the Girls shifts the perspective entirely. This is a story about war, but not from the viewpoint of the heroes. It’s about the women who were taken as prizes, whose suffering was never more than a footnote in the great myths.

What’s it about?

Briseis is a queen at the start of the novel, ruling alongside her husband in the city of Lyrnessus. But when the Greek army, led by Achilles, invades, her life is ripped apart in an instant. The men in her city are slaughtered, including her brothers and husband, and she is taken as a war prize—not just any prize, but one specifically given to Achilles, the most feared warrior among the Greeks.

Now a slave in the Greek camp, Briseis is forced to navigate her new reality. She is no longer a queen. She is barely even a person in the eyes of her captors. She lives among other women who have suffered the same fate, each one stripped of their names, their families, their futures.

Then comes the infamous dispute that history remembers—Achilles is forced to give Briseis to Agamemnon, sparking a chain of events that will change the course of the Trojan War. But while the myths focus on Achilles’s rage, Briseis knows that her fate is once again being determined by men who see her as nothing more than a piece in their power struggle.

The novel doesn’t just show Briseis’s story—it forces the reader to sit with the brutal reality of what these women endured. This is not a tale of love or romance. It is about survival, about the ways in which women under extreme circumstances find ways to live, endure, and hold onto the smallest fragments of agency they can.

What This Chick Thinks

This is a brutal but necessary perspective

Most versions of the Trojan War gloss over what happened to the women. They are mentioned—as wives, as captives, as mourners—but they are rarely given voices of their own. Briseis, in The Iliad, is little more than an object of contention between Achilles and Agamemnon. Here, she is a fully realized character—angry, grieving, and trapped in a nightmare she never asked for.

Pat Barker does not sugarcoat the horrors of war and slavery. The book is deeply uncomfortable at times, as it should be. It forces you to see the cost of these grand, heroic stories from the perspective of those who had no say in them.

Achilles is fascinating in this version

This is Briseis’s story, but Achilles is still a massive presence in it. He is not softened or romanticized here—he is both brilliant and monstrous, deeply human but also terrifyingly detached from the suffering he causes. Barker makes it clear that Briseis does not love him, but she does come to understand him. Their dynamic is complicated, one where power and trauma blur the lines of what it means to survive under someone else’s control.

The writing is stark but beautiful

Barker’s prose is direct, unembellished, but incredibly powerful. There is no grand, poetic language here—just the raw truth of what it means to be a woman in war. The way she captures Briseis’s numbness, her anger, her quiet rebellion is devastating. Even in the moments where Briseis seems resigned to her fate, there is an undercurrent of defiance in her very existence.

The silence of the girls is loud

The title is incredibly fitting. The novel explores how history erases women, how their pain is ignored in favor of glorifying the men who waged wars and sought glory. The “silence” here is not just the literal silencing of the captive women—it’s the way their suffering has been overlooked for centuries.

Barker also gives glimpses into the lives of the other captive women—Chryseis, Hecuba, Andromache—all figures we know from Greek mythology but who, in this version, feel like real people rather than just tragic names.

Final Thoughts

This is not an easy book to read. It is not meant to be. The Silence of the Girls is a powerful, harrowing novel that forces us to reconsider how we view history, mythology, and heroism. It gives voice to those who have been forgotten, and in doing so, it reshapes the Trojan War into something far more human than legend allows.

If you are looking for a book that romanticizes Achilles or turns the Trojan War into a love story, this is not that book. But if you want something that confronts the brutal realities of war from a perspective we rarely see, this is an unforgettable read.

Rating: 9/10

Try it if you like

• The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood – Another feminist retelling of Greek mythology, this time from Penelope’s point of view.
• A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes – A broader look at multiple women affected by the Trojan War, including queens, goddesses, and captives.
• Circe by Madeline Miller – A mythological retelling that focuses on a woman who was historically sidelined, but with a more magical, transformative story.