My newest book (with Alice Underwood) came out on September 1. It's called Clytemnestra: The Mother's Blade and tells the story of the sister of Helen of Troy. Clytemnestra was a powerful queen in her own right, with just as exciting a life.

But what I want to share with you is not my opinion, but a review of the book by Bob Mielke, professor of English at Truman State University:

With Clytemnestra: The Mother’s Blade the Tapestry of Bronze series authored by Victoria Grossack and Alice Underwood achieves a soaring new height. After previously making us rethink -- and re-experience -- such famed Greek women as Jocasta, Niobe and Antigone, they have dared to reimagine for us Clytemnestra: the murderous wife of Agamemnon and mother of avenging Orestes. Previously known to us as Sophocles’ villainess, especially as rolled into Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude by Shakespeare, Clytemnestra is here given the consideration it turns out she so richly deserves. Although second wave feminist revisionings certainly are a catalyst for such seeming subversions, a simple exploration of the mythological and quasi-historical record would suffice to show that Clytemnestra had most ample justification for her startling actions.

Rest assured that this is no mere act of feminist historical revisionism (not that there’s anything wrong with that per se!). Clytemnestra: The Mother’s Blade is the most action-packed and thrilling Tapestry of Bronze novel yet. One can imagine Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway drooling over this retelling at the prospect of playing such a character onscreen. Audaciously, the Trojan War is a mere sideshow in this incident-laden and surprisingly moving tale. It’s all a matter of perspective.

In sum, this book has it all: the intellectual act of re-envisioning the distant Hellenic past as plausible historical fact, the uncanny retelling of some very familiar stories in a strikingly new way and the pleasures of a thrilling beach read -- all at once. There are even a few distant echoes of the present in this vividly imagined antiquity. As wise old Nestor notes, “It is easy to make promises before one takes power, but difficult to keep them afterwards.” And war, Tyndareus cautions, “is a ruler’s weightiest decision, and should not be taken lightly” -- be it with Thebes, Mycenae, Troy, Venezuela or North Korea. Agamemnon is dead; long live Agamemnon....

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