Book Review: Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood

Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood

Book title: Lies We Sing to the Sea
Author: Sarah Underwood
Genre: Historical fantasy
Published: March 7, 2023
432 pages
My rating: 2/5

"There were twelve bodies in the water. They always found their way to the island of Pandou eventually, though the seas that stretched for miles around it were invariably still and silent. Melantho would have been foolish to think that it was the natural currents that had brought them; she had been there long enough to know that nothing found its way to Pandou unless it was meant to."

When Odysseus came back from the Trojan War, he hanged the twelve maids of Penelope and cast their bodies in the sea. This atrocity angered the sea god Poseidon, and for three hundred years he has ravaged the island of Ithaca and demanded the yearly hanging of twelve girls marked with a necklace of scales. But when this fate comes to Leto, she doesn’t die. Instead, she meets an immortal being, Melantho, who gives her a mission: to kill the Prince of Ithaca, Mathias, and end the curse of Poseidon for good.

Lies We Sing to the Sea is a debut Greek mythology retelling of (or rather, a sequel to) The Odyssey. As I love ancient Greek mythology, I was super excited to read it. Unfortunately, this book was a massive disappointment.

My first issue is the inaccuracies and anachronisms in the world building. For someone with even a little bit of knowledge of the ancient Greek culture and language, this book makes a frustrating read.  Lies We Sing to the Sea is set three hundred years after the Trojan War, which took place around the thirteenth or twelfth century BCE, so the events of this book should happen somewhere around tenth or ninth century BCE. That sets it right in the middle of the Greek Dark Ages (c. 1180–800 BCE) – so called because due to social upheavals people forgot how to read and write, and we have no written records from that time period.

However, that’s not what’s happening in this book: the characters are constantly referring to written texts, and even a poor girl like Leto knows how to read and write. Writing materials and utensils are easily available to everyone. And not only that, one document is said to be written on papyrus, paper, and parchment, as if those three words were synonymous and didn’t refer to three completely different writing materials. Two of those writing materials were actually invented long after the events of the book: parchment in the second century BCE and paper around 200 BCE. In addition, paper was invented in China and only arrived in Europe in the 12th century CE – two thousand years after the events in the book!

The Ithacan geography doesn’t sound accurate either. According to Wikipedia at least, the city of Vathi was founded in the 16th century CE, over two thousand years after the events in the book. The ancient Greek also wouldn't have pronounced the name as Vathi, that's the modern Greek pronunciation of Βαθύ. Speaking of names, the male main character is called Mathias. Although the form is Greek, the name comes originally from Hebrew, and it makes no sense why a wholly Greek family would give their child a biblical name at this time period. There is a horse, a mare, named Sthénios, which is a masculine form. The feminine would be Stheniás, which incidentally is an epithet of Athena – a single glance at an ancient Greek dictionary would have told you the correct form. There are also a host of smaller inaccuracies, including my pet peeve, the use of a fork way too early in history (personal table forks were probably invented in the 4th century CE and came to widespread use only after the Renaissance).

If you’re not a stickler for historical accuracy in historical fantasy, you probably won’t mind about the anachronisms. For me, the inaccuracies constantly yanked me out of the story. I think that the book would have worked a lot better if it had been set in a made-up fantasy world with fictional place names and been labeled as inspired by Greek mythology. The anachronisms wouldn’t have bothered me as much in that case.

However, that would not have helped with the plot issues of this book. Once I was finally able to look past the world building, I could not help but notice how the plot didn’t make sense. Why does Poseidon demand more girls to die in revenge the twelve maids that were originally killed? Why doesn’t he just demand the death of the princes of Ithaca in the first place?

The plot jumps from idea to idea to idea. There are way too many coincidences and plot holes. The characters decide (for whatever, usually unexplained reason) to go somewhere to find some piece of information. But once they get there, they immediately decide to leave and pursue another goal. Nothing ever gets resolved, no plot line or ploy is ever fully explored, and what’s worse, no one has any communication skills.

There’s no miscommunication, per se, rather the characters simply do not tell each other what they have learned or what they suspect. To give an example, at one point Leto suspects that Melantho has tampered with a saddle cloth in order to kill Mathias, not knowing that Mathias intended Leto to ride the horse. But that makes no sense. Why would Melantho not stop Leto from riding that horse? Why does Leto immediately jump to her conclusion and only bothers to ask about it a hundred pages or so later?

I’m also unsure what age demography this book is intended for. It reads like a YA book, and the ages of the main characters (Leto is seventeen and Mathias nineteen) seem to indicate that this is the case. But then there are sex scenes. Granted, they are all fade-to-black, but it still makes the books seem more adult than YA. I’m also not fully on board with Leto having sex with Melantho in one chapter and kissing Mathias the next – not to mention having sex with him right after telling him that he must die. The placement of that sex scene is odd to say the least.

That uncertainty of what the book is – YA or adult? – is emblematic of the whole book. Is it trying to be an Odyssey retelling or simply inspired by Greek myths? Is it a sapphic romance? Or is it a straight enemies-to-lovers story? Marketing this book as a sapphic seems disingenuous, considering how much time Leto spends going behind Melantho’s back to smooch Mathias. Making the love triangle into a consensual polyamorous relationship would have worked better. Now it just sounds like bi-erasure.

Not to give too much away, but there is no happy ending to anyone in this book. The author was clearly inspired by Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, but the similarities felt heavy-handed. The ending was trying to be poignant and impactful, but it fell flat.

The one positive thing I can say about this book is that the writing wasn’t bad. That earns the book two stars, but unfortunately, I wouldn’t recommend this book.