Warning: subject matter is very graphic!

I was given a head's up before starting the book that this was "a bit of a downer". Having just finished it, I would say that's an understatement, although it wasn't so depressing I couldn't make it through. This book sort of punches you in the gut with laying out the brutality of what happens to women in the aftermath of invasion: a city is sacked, destroyed, and it's populace murdered and taken as slaves. The frequency of rapes the main character and all the other Trojan women suffer at the hands of the Greeks was very startling at first, but then I realized that's because all the books, movies and tv shows retelling the Trojan War don't spend hours on them: they show the battles, they show the beautiful Helen, the show the carnage Achilles leaves on the battlefield. But it's what happens in the enemy's camp that Barker focuses on, where the captive women must somehow survive each day when they're subjected to beatings, rape, starvation, disease. The book is all about highlighting how important their stories are. This isn't just an ancient myth retold, it's reality for countless lives over the centuries in the real world.