Book Review: Sweetbitter Song

Title: Sweetbitter Song

Author: Rosie Hewlett

Date: 2026

Publisher: Sourcebooks

Quote: "Whatever they ask, you must do it."

Content warning: In the first chapter of this book, the line quoted above is spoken by an enslaved mother sending her nine-year-old daughter to their master, the king, for possible sexual abuse. That's the way the whole book is going to be. The narrator is enslaved. It's ancient Greece; a lot of sex and violence apparently went on and were talked about continually, though a substantial part of this story is about the kind of sex that wasn't talked about. If explicit torture, murder, rape, and passion put you off, find another book to read. 

Considering how much sex the ancient Greek writers talked about, one might wonder what they didn't talk about. This is what. In many ancient kingdoms the ruling family didn't dare to be alone. For reasons of security, if people weren't sleeping with a spouse, they usually slept with a servant of the same sex. It was assumed that all such pairs were sleeping back to back, for security alone. Ancient literature seems to make it clear that that was not the case. People loved their faithful servants, sometimes like brothers and sisters, and sometimes otherwise.

Most people (my age and older, at least) remember the story of Odysseus. How he sailed off to help his brother-in-law fight the Trojans, how he was credited with winning the war, how he sailed homeward but spent years drifting from island to island before returning to Ithaca. Faithful gray-eyed Penelope didn't even recognize him at first, but she'd been waiting, while dozens of would-be island kings hung out in the guest rooms of their house,insisting that Ithaca needed a king. 

Some say that some of Penelope's servants helped some of the "suitors." Some say they wanted a war chief too, though Penelope seems to have been a pretty good peace chief. Some say that some of Penelope's "maids" tried to seduce some of those men for themselves. In this novel, one of Penelope's maids is Melantho. They'd been friends, though one was a princess and one a slave, since childhood. When Odysseus went off to war, the young women's friendship turned into something else, something even the ancient Greeks seldom mentioned.

A lot of thought about slavery, and loyalty, and friendship, and what the ancient Greeks' religion meant to them, and whether people can choose to be happy, went into this novel but it's likely to be remembered most as a lesbian romance. Melantho is no "maiden," she's done a lot of things with a lot of men, but Penelope affects her pulse and blood pressure in a way no man ever will. Penelope has only ever had sex with Odysseus, but she returns Melantho's feelings. 

The publishers expect this book to sell to adults' book discussion groups. I expect adults who don't mind graphic sex and violence will enjoy it. I don't think it belongs in school libraries. 

That may be considered unfortunate, because, despite a little unavoidable anachronism in the characters' sensibilities  and language, this is a good example of the writer''s craft. Scenes are vividly imagined; characters are believable and relatable; if Hewlett's Odysseus is at the end of the book almost the opposite of Tennyson's "Ulysses" (a variant form of "Odysseus"), the original story leaves room for either possible outcome. For those who do want an explicit, passionate lesbian love story, this should be a great choice.