Beauty’s Daughter

Beauty’s Daughter by Carolyn Meyer, 337 pages

This is the story of Hermione, daughter of Helen of Troy and King Menelaus.  Hermione is always told that she looks exactly like her father but she knows that what everyone means is that she looks nothing like her mother.  When Helen is taken by Paris, Hermione follows her father to Troy to try to retrieve her mother.  We see Hermione’s life in a war encampment and follow their voyage back home, her subsequent unwilling marriage to Achilles’s son, Pyrrhus, and her quest to find love again with her childhood sweetheart and cousin, Orestes.  This is a good story with enough adventure to satisfy, although the book concentrates more on Hermione’s relationships, with her friends (female and male), her parents, and her lovers.  Although the overall book is based on the events surrounding the Trojan War, little was ever written about Hermione so most of that part of the story is made up by Meyer.  It’s a satisfying story and a good book for teens that enjoy historical fiction or books about the Greek myths.