Even though I could barely understand what was going on in the book with my lack of knowledge about the subject (it is not exactly beginner friendly), I often think about what I could remember from the ancient literature course I took back in college years ago. I remember what happened to the characters inspired by their real life counterparts. But it's often from the Greeks' point of view and not often by women and people who didn't fit their mold. I wish I had a way to give it a better rating, but I can see how essential it is for the modern times and to give the women/people of the minority a voice in history.

Really strong premise, and I have enjoyed it thus far. The formatting on the online version that I got from Netgalley is a bit messed up though, which does take away from the reading experience a bit.

Penelope’s Bones is a stunning mix of mythology, history, and science that pulls you in from the very first page. The way the author brings ancient stories to life—through archaeology, legends, and a sharp scientific lens—feels both fresh and deeply rooted. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to look things up, not because you’re confused, but because it sparks your curiosity. The balance of imagination and research is pitch-perfect, making the past feel alive without losing any of its complexity.

What really makes this book shine, though, is how it tells the stories of so many different kinds of women. From noblewomen to enslaved girls, warriors to mothers, every woman feels fully human and important. The writing gives space to their struggles and strength without turning them into clichés. Even the most difficult topics, like sexual violence, are handled with care and respect—never brushed aside, but never used for shock value either. This is a powerful, thoughtful read that sticks with you long after you’ve finished.

I've been a fan of the Odyssey since I first discovered it on my grandfather's bookshelf when I was nine or ten. I loved it so much I immediately turned around and read it again. Over the decades, I've had fun diving into various translations. On the other hand, I struggle to appreciate The Iliad. So when I heard about this book I was very eager to read it, and wondered how my different reactions to the two stories would affect my appreciation of it. In the end, it didn't really matter if I was a fan or not, as each chapter stood on its own as a fascinating look into the Late Bronze Age and some of the women who lived then.

The books begins chronologically, with The Iliad. Each chapter is about a different woman referenced in the epics, beginning with a short dramatic retelling of the woman's role in the story. Then the reader is introduced to where and how the evidence relating to this type of woman was found. Some of these archaeological findings were quite dramatic in themselves, and they are a good way to begin describing why a certain artifact is significant.

There's so much in this book to absorb – including discussions of how Homer sought to explain cultural differences to listeners who had no concept of women wielding political power. The author looks at how masculine interpretations and translations by archaeologists have short-changed women in these epics, including sometimes physically "completing" statues and frescoes to fit their modern idea of what they should look like. She then offers solid evidence, not mere speculations, for the importance of women to the Late Bronze Age and Homer's stories.

I appreciated that the author was careful not to read too much into the latest discoveries, as there isn't a lot a lot of physical evidence for life in this time, especially about women and children. She does a good job helping the reader to interpret what we do know, without leaps of fancy being presented as facts.

This look at Homer doesn't shy away from the reality of women's powerlessness against slavery, rape, forced labor, etc. It points out, for example, that Nestor in The Iliad makes clear that the point of the Trojan war isn't just to get Helen back, but to rape as many "enemy" women as possible in revenge.

At the end of the chapters the author also talks about recent novels that retell these women's stories in fiction. And she relates these ancient women's issues to our own today. There are also some wonderful photographs scattered throughout the book, not all lumped at the end, which makes the reading richer.

I loved reading this book, learning so much and developing new ways of viewing the women in these epics. I'll be immediately rereading them and look forward to blending what I read here into those stories. This is a very accessible yet detailed look at what we know, think we know, and have no clue about, when it comes to the lives the of the types of women who inspired these classics. Whether you're a fan or not, if you have any interest in these topics at all, I recommend this highly.

Thank you to University of Chicago Press, the author and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book for review.

I enjoyed this tour through The Odyssey via archaeological research, or perhaps it is vice versa, although it does drag on a bit at the end with the same formula for each chapter and some of the connections between text and findings is thin. Readers will appreciate the more direct connections Hauser can make between the Odyssey's events, descriptions, and details and archaeological finds from ancient Greece and its environs. She's excellent at teasing out the elements of feminist history that have been overshadowed or deliberately ignored in the record, such as the masses of women who were enslaved, catalogued in Linear B; how weaving and spinning and dyeing was done, as attested to from a site on Crete; and how and why DNA and other evidence is offering new interpretations of old finds. This would be a great companion read to Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey or related works for book groups.

Intriguing book with an unusual direction which separates it out from the myriad analyses of Homer's epics that already exist. An exploration of these known works through the eyes of the women who are often sidelined in masculine focused work. The clarity of the chronology of the archaeological work along with the literary backdrop is fascinating. Of note, this book is likely to be most interesting for people at least moderately familiar with the Iliad and Odyssey as this not a translation and assumes some knowledge of the characters and overall story (I suppose it could be enjoyed without the knowledge but I feel the reader may lose a little bit).

thank you to netgalley for providing this epup arc, and thank you to the author and the publisher as well. my opinion remains my own.

what you will find here is a completely indulgent and informative book full of extremely well researched lore and mythos. it is a bit dry but i felt captivated by the stories. this was a fun and unique dive into greek mythos. i highly recommend this for the history buffs, those who want a project book with good pay off and those researching feminist history. it was fabulous.

I enjoyed using different forms of archaeology to help map the stories of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the women within their lines. I learned a lot about different archaeological methods I had never heard of before. As well as civilizations and rulers that are not mentioned as often.

My main problem with this book was how often the author brought up her own books. I liked the references to other authors, but when she talked about her own, it felt like shameless self-promo. Some of the story is very dense and dry, making those chapters hard to read.

so excellent. hauser is clearly well researched; she has INCREDIBLE knowledge about each figure in this book. the maps, images, archeological evidence, etc. were all very useful in my understanding of them. here are some other aspects i thought were great:

- loved the short excepts hauser included in the beginning of each chapter! it's clear hauser has a background in writing historical fiction, and i think this puts her in the ranks of miller, saint, etc., as she employs an oppositional gaze towards both myth and history's portrayal of these iconic women.
- building on that point, i thought it was pretty cool that hauser pulled not just from historical sources but also contemporary poets and authors to illustrate her ideas (in her discussion of pasiphae, for example). there's an appreciation for her peers that i thought was quite beautiful.

all in all, a great book! i really feel like i learned so much about these figures (some of which i knew about, and some that i didn't!) i might even be convinced to pick up the golden apple trilogy next. love it <3

Hauser's ambitious assessment of the women in Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey weaves together contemporary archeological findings with an insightful reading of the hidden depths of female figures who are more often silent and spoken for in the sagas. By attending to each portrayal in turn--from the well-known Helen to the recently recuperated Briseis, alongside Cassandra, Athena, Penelope, and a host of others--Hauser argues that we are in a position to better understand the status of women in the ancient world. This includes, tragically, their vulnerability to enslavement and, effectively, trafficking between men, and Hauser looks at how sexual violence is both intimated and explicitly revealed in the Homeric poems.

This is a book that both specialists and non-specialists will find appealing, because Hauser's prose style is accessible but her research is impeccable. This is feminist analysis, not revisionism, and it contributes a scholarly perspective to the growing number of fictional revisions of the women of Greek myth, including in Hauser's own trilogy.

My only quibble is that sometimes the suggestive archeological and scientific data seems to be a bit tacked on to the literary analysis.

I am a historian who went through many many courses on the Ancient Greeks and their stories and myths and never have I come across a book with so much focus, detail, and information on the women of Greece. I love reading retellings on the Ancient Greek myths because the original stories are always so hyper-focused on how great the men are and how awful the women are. This book gives me hope that such courses on the Greeks will include better information about the women of Ancient Greece.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this!

"So, Muse: tell me about a woman."

With this inversion of Homer's famous invocation, Emily Hauser sets the tone for "Penelope's Bones," a work that dares to center women not as literary devices or symbolic placeholders but as historical agents whose lives shaped and were shaped by the world behind Homer's epics. Hauser's aim is not to embellish or fictionalize; instead, she anchors her inquiry in hard evidence, pulling from archaeology, ancient DNA analysis, and literary criticism to recover the lived realities of women in the Late Bronze Age. This is not mythologizing; this is historical reconstitution.

For readers who assume this is another fictional reimagining of the Homeric world, it is not. Penelope's Bones is nonfiction, through and through. Its narrative is guided not by invention but by inquiry, and its revelations come from imaginative flourish and painstaking research. It is quite deliberately a reckoning with Homer, history, and the stories we have too long told at women's expense.

Hauser argues that women are indispensable, not peripheral, to the Iliad and Odyssey. Helen, Briseis, Hecuba, and Penelope are not background figures. They are narrative catalysts, cultural symbols, and historical enigmas worth serious scholarly attention. The book turns traditional Homeric interpretation on its head: instead of using the epics to illuminate the past, Hauser uses what we know of the past, from skeletal remains to palace tablets, to interrogate Homer. She challenges the long-standing literary and historical practice of relegating women to the margins of myth and memory.

The scope of the book is impressively wide-ranging. Hauser moves fluidly between discussions of Bronze Age political structures and the mechanics of international trade, from the intricacies of Linear B tablets to the spiritual roles of goddesses like Thetis and Athena. She draws from Mycenaean grave goods, Hittite diplomatic letters, shipwrecks, and isotopic bone data to reconstruct ancient women's material and social lives. Themes of war, slavery, kinship, inheritance, and cultural exchange are threaded through each chapter, with mythic figures serving as gateways into broader historical realities. Framed around individual women from Homer's epics, the book's organization grounds this interdisciplinary sweep in human stories, giving the reader a point of emotional and intellectual entry into each new domain of inquiry.

One of the book's most sobering and original contributions lies in its discussion of malnutrition among women in the Bronze Age Aegean, a subject Hauser handles with rigor and empathy. She presents a picture of widespread, systemic nutritional inequality by drawing on skeletal analysis, isotopic data, and administrative records from Linear B tablets. Women, particularly those enslaved or of lower status, were consistently underfed relative to men. This disparity left visible traces on their bones and teeth, from enamel hypoplasia to pelvic deformation. The consequences were harrowing: a narrowed pelvic structure, the result of childhood malnourishment, drastically increased the risk of death in childbirth. This biological fragility, coupled with social expectations of repeated pregnancies, created a deadly feedback loop. Hauser presents this as a parallel to the glorified deaths of men in battle, except here, the battlefield is the domestic sphere, and the death toll is quiet, private, and largely erased. It's one of the book's most potent arguments: that silence, too, is a form of historical violence.

Throughout, Hauser resists the temptation to romanticize the past. Her feminist lens is clear, but so is her historical discipline. She acknowledges where the evidence is fragmentary, where interpretations must remain speculative. Still, the interdisciplinary breadth of her research—combining archaeological data, literary analysis, and cutting-edge genetics, grounds her narrative in substance rather than sentiment. The result is a book that asks urgent questions about how we read ancient texts and the priorities and prejudices of the cultures that have shaped their interpretation.

At a time when the politics of storytelling are under intense scrutiny, "Penelope's Bones" offers both a challenge to inherited narratives and a blueprint for reimagining them. Hauser doesn't simply retell old tales; she interrogates the conditions that shaped them and the ideologies that preserved them. Penelope's Bones doesn't just reframe the Homeric world; it reclaims it.

This review is of an advance reader copy provided by NetGalley and University of Chicago Press.

I just could not get into this book. I kept picking it up and putting it back down. The flow of it was weird for me and I just kept finding myself rereading it and not remembering what I read or what was going on. I have dyslexia so some books are hard for me while others are not a problem and this one was just hard.

Women have often been delegated to the sidelines when discussing ancient history and are definitely not the focus of traditional analysis of the works of Homer. Emily Hauser’s new nonfiction book Penelope’s Bones is trying to change that. Each chapter uses a different woman in The Iliad or The Odyssey as a jumping off point to bring in scientific research, archeology, geology, and contemporary non-Greek sources to examine the lives of women in Greece at the time. And you can really feel how well researched each chapter is, but Emily Hauser does a great job balancing the research and bringing it back to how it relates to the women of Homer and the women of Ancient Greece as a whole. One of the most interesting but heartbreaking chapters was the one that went into the perils of childbirth and what mourning children looked like at the time. Something I really appreciated in the book was how it looked at how interconnected Greece was with all of the societies around it in the Mediterranean, such as the Hittites and Egyptians, which has often been overlooked in the Eurocentrism of studies of this period in the past.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s well researched and the writing is clear and easy to understand. I can see this as a great starter nonfiction to anyone who reads fictional Greek myth retellings. All in all I think anyone who has at least a passing interest in Greek mythology could get a lot out of this book.

(The opinions in this review are my own but I wish to thank Emily Hauser, University of Chicago Press, and NeGalley for this eARC.)

Writing as someone who thoroughly enjoyed Madeline Miller’s “Circe” and Natalie Haynes’ “A Thousand Ships,” but has since slogged through at least half a dozen works in a similar vein since then, “Penelope’s Bones” felt like a breath of fresh air. Through in-depth and well-research contextualization of various aspects of life in Bronze Age Greece framed through a selection of several female characters from the “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” Emily Hauser has frankly made these women come more alive to me than many, if not most of the mythological retellings I’ve read. The range of topics covered here in detail made for not just a wonderfully informative experience, but at times a genuinely eye-opening one as well.

Seriously, this book feels like an absolute must-read for those who have been hungering heavily for a hearty serving of history to go along with their contemporary rewrites of great Greek myths and epics.

I was incredibly excited for this book, and it did not disappoint. This book explores the Iliad and Odyssey through the women- Briseias, Helen, Circe, and, of course, Penelope just to name a few.

@emilyhauserauthor has such a talent for combining stories with research. Each chapter opens with a scene that ties the book back to the original text with and gives the perspective of the figure it follows. The remainder of the chapter then examines the archaeology and scholarship surrounding that figure in order to show what the actual women living in the bronze age may have experienced.

This is one of my favorite nonfiction books now. 10000/10, you should definitely read it!

This book is a great exploration of women’s studies in the context of Homer. Hauser explores the historical context of the fictional women in the Iliad and the Odyssey by using DNA, historical records, textiles, and more. For me, the success comes from highlighting the interconnectedness of the ancient world, and how historical records allow modern scholars to reexamine myth and the presence of women in male-centric texts. Hauser also emphasizes the work of female archaeologists, researchers, and historians which is a nice reminder of the importance of women’s involvement in history—especially when you notice that the majority of sources for historical interpretations of the myths and women Hauser focuses on are from men. It’s a great read if you’re at all interested in the history behind Homer and Greek archaeology, but there’s also a wealth of information on other ancient civilizations.

I received an ARC through NetGalley from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This is an excellent non-fiction companion to novels like "A Thousand Ships" that explores Greek mythology from a feminine perspective. Dr. Emily Hauser's in depth exploration of who these women were, who they could have been, and what we can and can never know about them is fascinating and fresh. From well-known figures like Helen, Circe, and Aphrodite, to lesser-known but just as crucial characters like Briseis, Hecuba, and Nausicaa, this book discusses in as much detail as possible what is so often left out of history and mythology classes.

Thank you NetGalley and University of Chicago Press for the ARC.

WOW! I love this much more than I expected as someone who has never studied any of the classics to a full extent. I love how it’s written in a way that is accessible to *everyone* who wants to pick it up to learn about this.
This is a strong book that shows us just how people have chosen to make only the men seem strong and that myths are only for men when that isn’t true. The author does a beautiful job with the dedication to this study and sharing it with us as readers.

As a huge fan of Greek mythology, ancient history, and archaeology, this book was the perfect read. I loved that each chapter alternated between observing a different woman in Homer, and a topic related to that figure. The sheer range of topics - geography, textiles, architecture, weaponry, and more - was so fascinating. I had no idea that the Ithaca we know is practically the geographic opposite of Homer's Ithaca, or that the enamel on teeth could be used to figure out ancient diets. This book was so rich with information and I devoured all of it! I'm really looking forward to reading more of Emily Hauser's work in the future.
Thank you to NetGalley and University of Chicago press for the eARC!