Goddess of Yesterday follows Anaxandra, daughter of a minor chieftain in Mycenaean Greece, sent as hostage to the king of Siphnos. When Siphnos is sacked she ends up in the care of Menelaus of Sparta, witnessing the theft of Helen and the start of the Trojan war.
Cooney's novel succeeds where other fiction about the Bronze Age (like the execrable Gates of Fire) fails, largely because of the naive narrator. A girl raised in isolation, Anaxandra has no pretensions to sophistication or anachronistic open-mindedness. Observing Helen of Troy and her family from a child's perspective, she feels the eerie attraction of the queen's beauty and the repulsiveness of her selfish heart, but does not try to rationalize away the contrast as an adult would.
Anaxandra's youth also leads her to accept other Mycenaean customs such as the sacrifice of animals and humans in a natural manner. She imagines Agamemnon was shocked when the gods ordered him to "make his own daughter holy," but there is no pretense that he should have tried to second-guess fate. The romance between the heroine and the neutral king Evenus is innocent without being Victorian, and sparked by the 'new' custom of horseback riding.
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