I was skeptical about a retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of Briseis. I didn't want to read a perverted feminist spin that would give too much agency to a character who didn't have any in the original. But if the retelling were too faithful to the original, I would have been turned off by the sob story. Pat Barker surprised me by carefully crafting Briseis's perspective with realism.
Through Briseis's narration, we get the stink of the camp. Godlike Achilles takes a dump in a latrine that "[stinks] to high heaven and [i]s covered in a pelt of buzzing black flies." The less prized captive women are relegated to laundry duties, their legs permanently smelling of urine and their fingertips also "permanently pleated from long immersion in water." The description of the laundry women does not have the picturesque quality that it has inThe Iliad, though there, the same domestic activity is mentioned during the harrowing passage where Achilles is chasing Hector around the city of Troy (Book 22).

My one complaint is that the chapters told in the third person from Achilles's perspective were boring. The scene when Priam asks Achilles for Hector's body felt flat compared to the same scene in The Iliad because Homer's Achilles has a distinctive style of speech, not just in this scene but elsewhere too. He's one of the few characters who uses figurative language, which I assume doesn't lend to the realism that Barker is going for in her version. You'll get delicious details like Priam's knees cracking when Achilles helps him get up, but I wished Barker kept to Briseis's first-person narrative for the entire book.