The Women of Troy picks up where The Silence of the Girls left off. Troy has fallen. The Greek camp is full of enslaved Trojan women waiting to be divided among the victors like cargo. Briseis, formerly Achilles’ war prize and now the pregnant wife of Alcimus, narrates from an uneasy position of relative safety while the other women face fates that range from terrible to catastrophic. Barker’s focus is on the days and weeks between the fall of the city and the Greeks’ departure, the in-between time when the heroes are at loose ends and the women are at their most vulnerable.
Reader response to The Women of Troy has been strongly positive, particularly among readers who valued The Silence of the Girls for its unflinching feminist perspective on the Trojan War. The sequel was praised for its consistency of vision, its refusal to soften the brutality of the source material, and Barker’s continued ability to make ancient myth feel urgently contemporary. Where criticism appeared, it tended to focus on the novel’s relationship to its predecessor and whether it adds enough to justify its existence as a separate book.
Violence Without Glory
Barker’s greatest achievement in The Women of Troy is the same as in its predecessor: she strips the Trojan War of its epic grandeur and reveals the human cost beneath. The Greek heroes, Odysseus, Ajax, Pyrrhus, Calchas, are presented not as legendary figures but as men, often petty, brutal, and drunk, making decisions about women’s lives with casual indifference. Barker doesn’t demonize them exactly, but she refuses to let their heroic status obscure what they actually do. The effect is both destabilizing and clarifying, like seeing a familiar painting with the varnish removed.
The women at the center of the novel are rendered with extraordinary specificity. Briseis navigates her precarious position with intelligence and determination, using what limited agency she has to protect herself and others. The other Trojan women, Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra, are given their own distinct responses to captivity, from defiance to numbness to pragmatic survival. Barker is unsparing in showing how captivity affects each woman differently, and she doesn’t pretend that survival in these circumstances is anything other than a series of degrading compromises.
The prose is controlled and deliberate, stripped of ornament in a way that mirrors the novel’s thematic project. Barker writes violence and its aftermath with a clinical precision that makes it impossible to look away. She doesn’t linger on suffering for effect, but she doesn’t turn away from it either. The result is writing that feels honest in a way that mythological retellings often don’t. There’s no beauty in this war, and Barker doesn’t manufacture any.
The novel’s treatment of pregnancy and motherhood as experiences shaped by power is particularly strong. Briseis’s pregnancy, the child of a dead Greek hero growing inside a formerly enslaved woman, becomes a lens through which Barker examines how women’s bodies are conscripted into political narratives they have no control over. The child is simultaneously a source of hope and a potential liability, and Briseis’s navigation of this ambiguity is one of the novel’s most compelling threads.
The Sequel’s Burden
The most consistent criticism of The Women of Troy is that it doesn’t achieve the impact of The Silence of the Girls. The first book had the force of revelation, offering a perspective on the Trojan War that felt genuinely new. The sequel continues that perspective but without the same element of surprise. Readers who were thrilled by the originality of the first book sometimes found the second one confirming what they already knew rather than pushing into new territory.
The pacing is another common concern. The novel’s focus on the liminal period between Troy’s fall and the Greeks’ departure means there’s a lot of waiting. Characters are stuck in the camp, unable to leave, and the narrative sometimes feels similarly constrained. The plot operates more as a series of episodes than a building momentum toward climax, and some readers found this structure repetitive.
Briseis’s narrative position also drew mixed responses in this installment. In The Silence of the Girls, her status as an outsider gave her observations an electric quality. In the sequel, her relative security, married to a Greek, carrying a valued child, creates distance between her and the other women whose suffering she witnesses but doesn’t fully share. Some readers felt this distance weakened the novel’s emotional impact, making Briseis more of an observer than a participant in the story’s central drama.
A few readers also noted that the novel’s contemporary resonances, while powerful, occasionally feel too pointed. The parallels between ancient warfare and modern conflicts, between ancient and contemporary treatment of women in wartime, are drawn clearly enough that they sometimes risk feeling like commentary rather than emerging organically from the story.
The Space Between War and Peace
What The Women of Troy captures with particular insight is the specific horror of the aftermath, the period when the violence has technically stopped but its consequences are still unfolding. The war is over, but for the women, nothing is resolved. They’re in a holding pattern, waiting to learn who will own them, where they’ll be taken, whether their children will be spared. This waiting, this powerlessness in the face of decisions being made elsewhere by people who don’t consider them fully human, is a different kind of brutality than the battlefield, quieter but no less destructive.
Barker understands that wars don’t end when the fighting stops. They continue in the bodies and minds of survivors, in the political calculations of the victors, in the erasure of the defeated from their own stories. The Women of Troy is ultimately about that erasure and the act of writing against it.
Should You Read The Women of Troy?
If you read and admired The Silence of the Girls, this sequel is close to essential. It extends Barker’s feminist interrogation of the Trojan War myth with the same unflinching clarity, and it deepens several characters who deserved more space. It’s also a strong entry point for readers interested in mythological retellings that prioritize realism over romance, though reading the first book will significantly enrich the experience.
If you found The Silence of the Girls too bleak, the sequel won’t change your mind. The Women of Troy operates in the same register, and the subject matter, enslaved women in a war camp, doesn’t offer many opportunities for lightness. If you prefer your mythological retellings with more wonder and less grime, Barker’s approach will likely not be for you.
The Verdict on The Women of Troy
The Women of Troy is a worthy sequel that extends Pat Barker’s project of reclaiming the Trojan War from its heroes and returning it to the people who paid the highest price. It doesn’t hit with quite the same force as The Silence of the Girls, and the waiting-room pacing tests patience at times. But Barker’s prose remains powerful, her characterizations are sharp and unsentimental, and her insistence on treating ancient women as fully human rather than mythological props gives the novel a moral clarity that few historical retellings achieve. It’s not a comfortable book, and it’s not trying to be. What it offers instead is the harder, more valuable thing: an honest one.