Review: The Cassandra

The Cassandra by Sharma Shields
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Cassandra by Sharma Shields is a retelling of the classic Cassandra myth, set at the Hanford nuclear facility during World War II. Full disclosure, I once again missed that it was a myth retelling until after I read it.

Mildred gets a job at Hanford as a secretary, and happily leaves home in Omak, Washington, where she had been her mother's caregiver. There is also a sense that she tried to kill her mother, but this isn't immediately explained.

Once at Hanford, the other women discover that Mildred has a penchant for sleepwalking, but with visions. She often wakes in the middle of the night in a river or a lake! She has visions of great violence at work as well.

Except. There is this feeling of Patricia Highsmith level of sociopath in Mildred that makes her completely unsympathetic as a character ... And it gets darker and darker up to the end of the novel. I don't know if this is a match to the myth, or if it the author's brilliant way of turning the reader into one more person who refuses to listen....

I had a copy from the publisher through Edelweiss. It came out February 12, 2019.

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