Point of View

The point of view of “A Thousand Ships” is third person, with the exception of Calliope and Penelope who write in the first person. Calliope is the creative force behind the narrative, and the reader has the sense that it is she who tells the story, while Penelope crafts her own epistolary narrative within the overall arc of the novel.

Each chapter is devoted to the point of view of a woman or group of women associated with the Trojan War. Therefore, the novel is not a single united narrative from one overarching perspective, but rather a mosaic of narrative fragments that cohere together into a whole. These various micro-narratives are related to one another, and occasionally reference one another, and yet they are distinct: Cassandra’s point of view is very different from Andromache’s, for example.

Sometimes a chapter juggles various points of...