Leto, Matthias, and Melantho all must work together to break this curse, and save thousands of future girls from hanging. Poisedon was unhappy with this, as he was with all of Odysseus’ actions, and so Ithaca has been under his curse ever since, and unless twelve young women that he chooses are hanged as a sacrifice, Ithaca will be pulled into the ocean.

The origin of the story is the murder of Penelope’s twelve maids in The Odyssey, when Odysseus decides the young girls who had been assaulted were traitors, and orders his son, Telemauchaus, to kill them. The story follows Leto, a young girl from Ithaca Mathias, the crown prince of Ithaca and Melantho, a former royal maid of Ithaca under Posideon’s curse. Would I see myself in the characters? Would it have exposed me to new ideas sooner than I was? Would it become my new hyperfixation? While Lies We Sing to the Sea is missing some of the elaborate prose and devastating violence of some other mythological retellings, it is the perfect introduction to both the world of The Odyssey and the women whose voices have been lost to history for young adults. When I read YA as an adult, I often think about what my younger self would make of it.

I was intrigued by Lies We Sing to the Sea, not only because of its clever premise, but because it’s a YA novel. Regardless, these books consistently give voices to women that both history and myth have refused to previously, and for that, I will continue to pick these novels up. The recent influx of the feminist Greek myth retelling genre has birthed both incredible literary ventures like Circe or Daughters of Sparta, and some books that are decidedly less extraordinary. In our Lies We Sing to the Sea book review, we want to illuminate how Sara Underwood uses the universality of teenage problems to let people know they aren’t alone, making Greek mythology more approachable in the process.

Sarah underwood lies we sing to the sea