Reviews

In Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos, Karen Martin reanimates one of antiquity’s most shadowed myths. From the volcanic heart of Lemnos, she draws forth the story of Hypsipyle, the daughter who defied divine decree and human expectation to spare a life and, in so doing, condemned herself to exile. The novella unfolds with the solemn beauty of ritual, simultaneously fierce and meditative, lyrical and restrained. It extends the preoccupations of Martin’s earlier Dancing the Labyrinth, into a landscape where myth and conscience converge. The opening sequence situates the reader amid celestial vengeance. Aphrodite, humiliated when Hephaestus exposes her union with Ares, seeks retribution upon his sacred island. Her wrath descends through the Erinyes, who hiss her malediction: “Let the hearts of Lemnos’ men turn cold to their wives… and when love’s fire burns for the foreign, may wrath bloom in the hearts of Lemnian women.” The gods are revealed in their familiar cruelty, capricious, immoderate, indifferent to the mortal wreckage they engender. Yet Martin renders this divine conflict with a psychological intimacy that transforms it from spectacle into allegory. The vengeance of Aphrodite becomes a metaphor for the contagion of shame, the humiliation of one woman visited upon an entire sisterhood. When the narrative descends to the mortal sphere, the prose contracts into human cadence. The women of Lemnos, abandoned for Thracian captives, gather in fury. The elder Pollyx urges action: “Better to scorch the field than let the weeds take root.” The island becomes a forge of resentment, its air heavy with salt and silence. Hypsipyle, daughter of King Thoas, stands apart. She is the moral centre around which the story turns, a figure of compassion surrounded by the din of vengeance. Her choice to save her father: “If I save you, I betray my sisters. If I do nothing, I betray myself,” is the hinge upon which the narrative and her destiny turn. The line, delivered with devastating simplicity, distils the impossible calculus of love and duty that defines both the character and the human condition. The very name Hypsipyle, meaning She of the High Gate, deepens Martin’s interpretation. It suggests both elevation and threshold: a liminal figure poised between worlds. In Martin’s retelling, the high gate is not a symbol of nobility but of conscience. Hypsipyle stands guard at the passage between vengeance and mercy, between the law of gods and the law of compassion. Her name becomes a quiet prophecy of her role: the keeper of the gate through which humanity must pass if it is to rise above divine cruelty. The massacre scene, rendered with the austerity of tragedy, spares the reader no truth yet denies the indulgence of spectacle. “Knives sharpened by the men at the request of either their wives or concubines, sliced through flesh and bone.” In this brief and terrible sentence, Martin captures the communal complicity that haunts the act of retribution. The women’s liberation comes at the cost of their innocence, and Hypsipyle’s mercy isolates her from both camps: too tender for the victors, too guilty for the dead. Her coronation in the aftermath is stripped of grandeur. The sea is still, the island mute. Authority becomes penance. The so-called Lemnian crime has long been a site where patriarchal thought locates the origin of feminine monstrosity. From Herodotus onward, the slaughter of the Lemnian men has been invoked as shorthand for unnatural female violence, a mythic rationale for the containment of women within civic order. Psychoanalytic readings, from Lacan’s notion of the woman as mirror of masculine anxiety to Foucault’s analysis of transgression as the boundary that defines normality, reveal how such narratives have functioned to police the limits of desire and speech. In the classical tradition the crime becomes a moral warning; in Martin’s hands it becomes a field of resistance. Martin’s retelling dismantles what Derrida called the phallogocentric architecture of myth, the privileging of the male word as law and the female act as excess. By rendering the killings through the women’s collective consciousness rather than through divine or heroic commentary, she reverses the hierarchy of speech and silence. The women of Lemnos are no longer the abject objects of moral discourse but the narrators of its collapse. Their violence, reframed through trauma rather than pathology, exposes the structures that produced it. Hypsipyle’s choice to save Thoas becomes an ethical deviation that restores meaning to compassion within a world governed by vengeance. Martin thus engages with what Foucault described as the productive nature of transgression, the point at which violation reveals the hidden mechanics of power. The Lemnian crime ceases to be an indictment of women and becomes a mirror held to patriarchal fear itself. Her prose refracts the symbolic order through which myth has long criminalised female autonomy and replaces it with a discourse of responsibility and renewal. In this sense, Martin’s approach also recalls Hélène Cixous’s Castration or Decapitation?, which argues that patriarchal myth severs women from language and authority. By allowing the Lemnian women to speak their crime, Martin restores to them what Cixous calls the right to “speak in tongues,” to reclaim a multiplicity of meaning that resists the singular logic of punishment. Lemnos, scarred and smouldering, becomes both setting and symbol—the physical manifestation of psychic ash. Through its windswept desolation, the reader feels the weight of moral aftermath. The novella’s rhythm is meditative, shaped by pauses and breaths, its lyricism disciplined by ethical inquiry. When the Argonauts arrive, the narrative widens again into myth. Jason and his companions, weary from voyage, confront an island ruled by women who have known the extremes of wrath and repentance. Pollyx, ever pragmatic, counsels Hypsipyle to meet violence with reason: “We choose the winners. We set the rules. We give them what they desire, while we take what we need.” Hospitality becomes strategy; seduction becomes statecraft. Martin reinterprets this episode, often trivialised by earlier poets, as a study in negotiation between trauma and renewal. Hypsipyle’s union with Jason, rendered in sparse, elegiac tones, produces twin sons sent away to Thrace, an act that repeats the motif of separation and survival. Every gesture of love in this novella carries an aftertaste of exile. Martin’s Hypsipyle stands in quiet conversation with her literary foremothers: Antigone, Medea, and Cassandra. Yet unlike them, she does not perish for her defiance nor seek to justify her rage. She endures. This ethical deviation, first embodied in her rescue of Thoas, deepens into a vision of feminine power grounded in conscience rather than revolt. The novella’s feminist strength lies in its restraint. Martin avoids the declarative didacticism that mars many modern mythic retellings. Instead, she allows moral clarity to emerge through ambiguity, as if the text itself were a ritual of purification. The voice of the Lemnian women is rendered collectively, often in choral refrains: “We gathered. All of us. Not with rage, but with resolve.” Their unity, fragile yet deliberate, speaks to the enduring need for solidarity amid the fractures of guilt. The prose of Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos is a study in cadence. Each sentence moves with sculpted precision, balanced between fire and restraint. The diction is elemental; sea, ash, flame, wind, and every image serves the architecture of emotion. The style evokes both the austerity of ancient lament and the lucidity of modernist prose poetry. As in Dancing the Labyrinth, Martin’s writing merges archaeological consciousness with psychological excavation. Both works are meditations on the endurance of women through the erosion of time and myth. Yet Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos reaches further into the moral terrain of culpability and grace. In Dancing the Labyrinth, the discovery of the Minoan cave restored a lineage of forgotten women; here, Hypsipyle’s solitary mercy becomes the cave itself, a vision of compassion painted upon the blackened walls of retribution. The significance of reinterpretation lies in its challenge to the permanence of mythic authority. As Adrienne Rich observed in When We Dead Awaken, revision is an act of survival, the refusal to inhabit stories written against one’s existence. In reclaiming Hypsipyle, Martin participates in a feminist lineage that views the reimagining of myth as both creative and reparative. It is a form of counter-memory that exposes how myth’s sacred aura has served to naturalise systems of domination. The ethical force of Martin’s retelling lies precisely in its refusal to sever the myth from its trauma; she transforms inherited violence into moral insight. In its scope and sensibility, Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos stands beside the mythic reclamations of Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, and Madeline Miller. Like Barker’s Silence of the Girls, it strips away the heroic veneer of epic to expose the moral exhaustion beneath conquest; like Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, it restores to the chorus of women the collective dignity of witnesses and survivors; and like Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles, it gives lyric voice to those exiled from power yet fluent in endurance. Martin, however, writes from a distinctive vantage as a philhellene whose reverence for the Hellenic world deepens rather than domesticates her critique. Her Lemnos breathes with volcanic immediacy, her moral vision tempered by compassion. Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos is therefore a fierce lyrical reclamation of one woman’s struggle to shape her destiny in the wake of divine retribution, a work that transforms myth into moral meditation and restores to Hypsipyle the autonomy that time and tradition denied her. The final chapters return to the goddess whose wrath set the cycle in motion. Aphrodite does not reappear; her silence is the most eloquent of verdicts. The absence of divine closure leaves the reader suspended between justice and forgiveness, mirroring Hypsipyle’s own condition. The women of Lemnos rebuild their world without divine sanction, discovering in their own labour the only form of grace the gods will ever grant. The novella closes not upon redemption but upon endurance, the quiet persistence of life after ruin. Martin’s achievement lies in the precision of her moral imagination. She neither revises myth for modern sensibility nor venerates it as untouchable relic. She listens to it. Through Hypsipyle she teaches the reader to listen to the muted histories that survive in the pauses between epic lines, to the small voices that outlast the roar of heroes. In doing so, she restores to myth its oldest power: the power to reveal the divine within the human act of remembrance. DEAN KALIMNIOU

I don't recall having heard about the Lemnos myth before. What Karen Martin does in this novella is retell this story from a feminist stand point, that of the woman who betrays the other women, her sisters. I feel that, unlike the other books in this series, this is a book of big feelings of maturity, a book of grief, of questioned values and what it means to live a life suffocated by guilt. This is a book defined by a sort of sobriety that these kind of big feelings create. Despite this, I loved the many layers of feminine perspective: the beauty and justice the women provide for their leader, her Queen's soft approach and space created for the wrongdoings to be met, the relationship Hypsipyle has with he body, the way she views the newly created games, so many layers of what it means to bring forth a woman's perspective. I am grateful to have received this in order to share my view. In the end, this book is an act of justice in itself, of giving voice to the women history has condemned in its tale of the Lemnos myth. And it's a lesson for this times of transition where women still struggle to choose between the patriarchal days toward a more balanced world. Ioana (Goodreads/ Amazon)

This is the first of Karen Martin’s books I’ve read and I truly enjoyed it. At some point, I’ll circle back to her previous works. Told through a feminist lens, Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos is the story of women working together in sisterhood, to reclaim their lives, no matter the cost, and about the impossible choices we often are forced to make. Karen Martin has shined a light on this not-so-well-known myth, fashioning it into a defiant tale of betrayal and revenge, but also one of moral introspection. We are only human and we make mistakes. The story is thought-provoking: we all face moral dilemmas. What would you do in this situation? Additionally, it unmasks the effects of trauma which can breed the unthinkable. And that when fate or divine intervention thwarts our plans, we must proceed with caution, as there are always consequences. It’s a quick read. Pick up your copy.

It is no secret that loyalty, when divided, can present a punishing tightrope that is impossible to walk. To which side then, do we lean, and ultimately fall, when faced with insurmountable, ill-fated choices? What would it cost? In this case, what would it cost a woman? Award-winning Australian playwright and author, Karen Martin guides readers through the “corridors of the underworld” in her latest novella as she retells the “infamous” history of Lemnos from a feminine perspective – the perspective of Lemnian Queen, Hypsipyle. Martin untangles Arachne’s “exquisite web” to reveal just how royal roots bloom into “weighted” routes as the blessing of power also curses with consequence. Imprisoned in a labyrinth of torment, Hypsipyle’s moral dilemmas and “patterns of misfortune” appear to ensnare all who enter her sphere of influence, as her journey seeks to “rebirth” the feminine resolve while silently striving to repair the resulting ripples in her own reflection. Down a revolutionary road paved with survival and reclamation, each sentence navigates the seemingly predestined build of “intimate burden”, anticipatory grief, the blueprint of repercussion, and the” waged wars” between “heart, soul, and mind”. True to the conventions of Greek myth, with a twist, the author’s style is emblazoned with vivid imagery and artistic prose from the onset. Aphrodite’s “sadistic spite” towards her husband, Hephaestus leads to a retribution-stained alliance with the chthonic goddesses, “Erinyes” who ignite the “vengeful ruin” and curse of Lemnos left for all “pitiful mortals” to bear – “Let the hearts of Lemnos’ men turn cold to their wives.” The author focuses on how in retaliation to their abandonment, all women of Lemnos—except for one—emerge from the “silent slaughter” of men as “killers, survivors, sisters” … “not redeemed, but rebirthed” … unified, yet isolated. At this very moment, audiences will be thrust into suspense and the depths of patriarchal duty as Hypsipyle is reborn in her own right while knowingly exiling herself from the women she governs by saving her father, King Thoas. Alongside recurring acts of justice and sacrifice, Hypsipyle’s epochal decision and truthful admission steers the novella and shapes the view of the “Lemnian Crimes”. Haunting and explorative, Martin reveals how the notion of lasting freedom is not merely seized by expectation, but rather, integrates itself as an unattainable right in Hypsipyle’s life while being presented as the price women must pay for their honesty and defiance. Despite the personal cost, Martin skilfully underscores truth as a cathartic ritual, necessary for renewal, reinvention, and rebirth. In addition, vulnerability can be interpreted as inherent to the feminine resolve, emerging as a crucial force that reflects inner fortitude, integrity, and resilience. Layered lessons, metaphors, and a sense of duality also help to awaken and establish this unique interpretation of Lemnian history. From the very soil in which Hypsipyle “plants the seed of her undoing”, she is shepherded by her “garden turned oracle” imbued with memories of her late mother, Myrina. Nostalgia aids in reflecting Hypsipyle’s compassion and fealty struggles on a broader, deeply human level, as her devotion to both parents touches the “vulnerable child” in all of us. Martin ingeniously calls on the inescapable laws of nature and time as themes to illustrate the protagonist’s spiritual strength, accentuating the evolution of her resolve. As Hypsipyle ventures out of the roles imposed on her, inherited societal norms for women further peel away, revealing a deeper, more complex and introspective understanding of femininity and its purpose across the ages. Through sublime symbolism and irony, it is evident that Hypsipyle’s destiny – as a daughter; a woman, and a queen – would always be met with perplexing expectations: “Rule with fire and restraint” … “If you kill the drones before the queen lays again, there will be no next generation” … “which roots will still feed the soil?” Jason, his argonauts, and the peace of anonymity for Hypsipyle following exile provides healing intervals to the story and grants glimpses of hope for both characters and readers alike amid enduring shame and crestfallen circumstances. Upon reflection, reshaping the fabric of identity is not only highlighted as pivotal to the novella, and Hypsipyle, but to the agency of all Lemnian women. Extracted from “the shadows”, this essential retelling of Lemnian history offers a room between worlds where conscience can converse beyond voice. A woman’s conscience. This version bestows Hypsipyle and her “emotional toll” the spotlight as Martin uses her “creative liberty” to successfully push past the less visceral boundaries of previous iterations, and in doing so, orchestrates a space where “women become seen and heard”, even in their silence. As Martin notes, “we owe this to our daughters”. Christine Fillipidis, The Greek Herald