Because we're blessed with the gift of not knowing the future, life isn't just what happens. It's enriched by the cloud of possibilities, what might happen, what we expect and hope for. This novel is a showing rather than a telling of the stories of Troy, restoring the immediacy of the moment as experienced by Cassandra, Helen, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Polyxena, Andromache, Leda, and Hecuba.

Your familiarity with the traditional stories will prompt you to anticipate, only to be surprised by depths of personality and motivation, consistent with the original, but unexpected. And you'll savor the ironic differences between what you know as a reader and what the characters know.

Rather than tediously proceed from one event to the next, you leap ahead from one dramatic moment to the next. The action takes place in dialogue and inner dialogue (thoughts in the making) rather than narration/exposition.