The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story of the Odyssey

The Wanderings of Odysseus is Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling of Homer's Odyssey and the companion to her Black Ships Before Troy. It picks up where the Iliad leaves off, following Odysseus from the smoking ruins of Troy through ten years of delayed homecoming to his return to Ithaca and the reckoning with Penelope's suitors.

The episodes homeschool students remember are all here and told at length: the Cyclops Polyphemus, the enchantress Circe, the descent to the land of the dead, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the sun, Calypso's island, and the archery contest that ends the story. Sutcliff keeps Homer's structure, including the flashback frame in which Odysseus narrates his own adventures at the Phaeacian court, so students meet the storytelling technique as well as the plot.

Families generally use it in grades 5 through 8, immediately after the Iliad volume. Read as a pair, the two books give a student the whole Trojan cycle in a single term, which is why they appear together on so many ancient-history reading lists. The Odyssey volume is often the more popular of the two with reluctant readers — it is structured as a sequence of adventures rather than a siege, so it carries momentum.

Practical notes: the book assumes some familiarity with the war, so reading it before the Iliad volume leaves a few references unexplained. As with the companion, the violence of the final chapters is not softened. Sutcliff's sentences are long and rhythmic, which rewards reading aloud but can slow an independent reader down at first — many families read the opening chapters together and then hand it over.

Published by Penguin Random House.